How to Scaffold Student's Writing

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This week we worked on practicing our grammar. We first reviewed the parts of speech we have gone over. I love using whiteboards as it allows me to quickly review all the student’s understanding of the concepts. I use the program Framing Your Thoughts by Project Read as it is a multisensory program that systematically teaches the writing process. The plan today is to use a sentence starter to help focus the student’s on a particular grammatical feature. Sentence Starters are a scaffold to assist writers

As part of this program we have reviewed first the simple conventions of sentences (capital letters at the beginning of a sentence and a stop at the end of the sentence, period, question mark or exclamation mark).

The next part of speech we review are nouns. The parts of speech all have a visual as well as a poem with actions to help the students remember the parts of speech.

After teaching and reviewing nouns we begin to assemble ‘barebone sentences’. This is one of my favorite lessons as it teaches the students the essentials. I use a wishbone to help illustrate this concept. This is a hard concept so we spend a great deal of time on this. Students want to add extra words but in doing so they don’t recognize the type of words that they need to make sure are in their sentences. One way that I do this is that I use the student’s name as the subject/noun of the sentence and I have them think of words for verbs for the sentence.

We then use the white boards and the students have practice writing their own barebone sentence. I have them hold up the white boards once they have finished the sentence. If I see an error I don’t correct but rather tell them “Opps I see 1 problem”. I want them to begin right from the start of the writing process to review their own writing to have this ownership of the process. When we start with the barebone sentences I can also quickly see if the problem that the group is having is in conventions or in grammar.

I don’t usually correct the spelling at this point in the process but rather take note of the spelling errors and consult with the teacher if the students have learned that spelling rule or sound symbol correspondence. The one error that I will correct is capital letters in words that they don’t belong in.

After a review of grammar, I gave the students a sentence starter. Sentence starters help students by:

Reducing the pressure on the student to come up with an idea. The sentence starter gives them a starting point.
It helps focus the student on the grammatical feature that you would like them to use.
It scaffolds their writing to assist them in staying on the theme
It helps students learn and use vocabulary that they might not use independently

As it was Valentine’s day it had that as a theme. I projected a sample and gave the project as a quick write. ( The project was to use Conversation hearts however our school’s has a no snack policy so we drew the hearts instead.) The students were cute as some of them added their own messages on the hearts. I like also having the students have a space not just to write but also to illustrate their sentences.

It is so exciting to see that the students are now able to get to work quickly. We then had a share with a positive peer comment. The students were excellent in giving meaningful critiques, complimenting novel sentences, drawings and the use of complex sentences.