I've heard so many times "I can't teach writing", "writing is so hard to teach". Writing is honestly one of my favorite subjects to teach because you start to see a child's creativity come out. I understand though, it isn't easy to teach a child how to be creative. I find that if I provide a structure and give my student's plenty of time to think through writing that it really becomes a successful endeavor.
I love to teach fictional writing as my first unit in first or second grade. It's more simple then opinion or informational writing and really a student can write about a whole variety of topics. I usually structure my writing time as a 5-10 minute mini lesson and then give the students plenty of time to write. In the beginning there will be a lot more reading than writing but that is ok, you need to first build a foundation.
I start out my unit by reading some of my favorite fictional picture books. These are the books that the kids love to listen to. I display my fiction anchor chart and explain what a fiction story is. As they listen they need to listen for what makes the story fictional.
They can listen for make believe characters a make believe setting or a make believe event. Make sure your students know what characters, setting and events of the story are. If they don't know, do a couple mini lessons about each of those topics. Included in my fictional writing resource, there are anchor charts to teach each of these elements.
While you read the books, record on charts some of the specific fictional parts of the stories. Display these charts as a reference for later; these will help give students ideas for their own stories.
The first official writing step is the prewriting. This is where students think of what they want their story to be about. They can write some ideas down or they can draw a picture in order to help them remember what they want to write about. To help expand their ideas, use the guiding questions such as: who are my characters? What is going to happen to my characters? Where is my story going to be? Understand that this is not them deciding on all the details of their story, it is just a beginning to get them thinking.
The next step is planning. You will want to do each of the planning pages on separate days. The first day you are going to discuss characters. You are going to write your characters for an example story you are writing. On smaller planning pages students will write down their main characters and all the other characters. If your students are advanced writers, have them also describe their characters and use some colorful adjectives. There are some mini lesson pages about adjectives included in my resource. Repeat the process on day 2 for the setting and day 3 for the problem and day 4 for the solution. For the solution I have them write a couple steps on how they solve the problem and then how it is finally resolved in the end.
I then have students do some editing. They edit their own papers then they peer edit someone else's paper. Last, I look at their story. As they edit they look for ending marks at the end of sentences. Then they ask "does this make sense?" If it doesn't, they need to fix the sentence. It is real simple editing but I find that this is really all they can handle!
Once editing is done I have students rewrite their story on nice paper and illustrate it with beautiful pictures.
I have included in my resource all the anchor charts and planning pages you need. I have also included some teacher examples, one that you use at the beginning of the year that is simple and short. One to use in the middle of the year with more details and one to use at the end with lots of details and even dialogue. You can also use the examples with low, middle and high groups of kids.
While there are lots of steps in this writing unit, it is broken down into small, manageable chunks.
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