Get to Know Students, and Teach Foundational Writing Skills, with Informational Writing

Teachers on the east coast are just trying to get in their last days of summer, while teachers in the south and midwest are prepping classrooms and greeting students. Many of the teachers we work with start the year in writing in the same way–personal narrative writing. The rationale has been that we use this time and this genre to get to know our students, while teaching them to write a controlled narrative. And while we love the closeness that can come from telling stories about ourselves–that is, afterall, what humans do for so much of our days, tell stories about ourselves and each other–many teachers we work with worry that our kids don’t have the basics down yet, from sentence structure to paragraphing, and that narrative isn’t always the easiest genre for teaching syntax, and organization. So why not switch it up? Starting with a quick informational piece can help us get to know our students–what they like to do, where they go, what they’re passionate about and can teach–all while teaching conventions and syntax.

For this idea, we’re going to use some lessons from our book Informational Writing Lessons: Your Go-To Guide for Flexible, High-Impact Instruction. The intention is to focus on teaching sentence and paragraph structure within the genre of informational text as well as to get to know your students’ interests, so it’s meant to be quick, not a research project. You could easily have students practice and build upon this unit by moving it into content area writing, as a way to solidify some conventional habits, while supporting comprehension and knowledge building through writing about their learning.

You might start with a classic heart-map; ask students, what are some things you love (like we do in lesson 3.2 in our book)? Or perhaps get students to write about things they like to do: games, sports, activities, things they play or watch (lesson 3.3). You might ask them about places (lesson 3.6) or people (3.7) they know about. Students can gather these ideas in notebooks, or for younger students draw and write their ideas across booklets or pages. As students write, or after they choose a topic to focus on, teach them foundational writing skills. This might mean for young writers to lean on their bank of known high frequency, words to write patterned sentences, to tap or clap words, or syllables, to stretch words and hear beginning, medial and end sounds (lessons 2.4, 2.5 from our book). Writers will likely benefit from paragraphing lessons (like our lesson 2.20) that move from fact to detail, or lessons on crafting complete, and then create longer sentences, perhaps with conjunctions (our lesson 2.22) or how to create compound sentences (lesson 2.23).

We hope you’ll consider mixing things up this year and getting to know your students with informational writing. Let us know how it goes!