Helping the Reticent Writer

In the Writer’s Workshop model of instruction, pioneered by Lucy Calkins, Nancy Atwell, and Donald Graves, among others, students are encouraged to see themselves as writers. Helping students to accept the reality of their own authorship can be a difficult task for some children for whom writing may be a difficult task.

One of the benefits of the writer’s workshop approach, especially for students having difficulty with writing, is the idea of a “mini-lesson.” Children are presented with a “bite-sized” piece of guidance at the beginning of each workshop. They are encouraged to practice the skill introduced in the mini-lesson, eventually becoming skillful at applying the skill in their own writing.

We can use the idea of a “mini-lesson” as we work individually with students to support their identification as authors. The idea is to choose a small writing task that can help the author create a larger piece of work. Over the next few months, I will be sharing a number of small lessons designed to help reticent writers feel immediate satisfaction.

The first and most easily accessible kind of writing is poetry. In a beginning poetry mini-lesson, one could introduce the idea of repeated patterns. Poetic patterns can be ending sound patterns, such as rhyming, repeated consonants (alliteration), or internal vowel sounds that are repeated (assonance). Patterns can be whole lines that are repeated or individual words that are repeated. What could be a better way to end the lesson than by recording into an ipod to hear it in your own voice?

One Comment

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