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Do you want your students to write effortlessly?
The basic idea is to get students to produce rich writing by having them practice often with highly stimulating images as the prompt.
Let me tell you...my students were tremendously engaged. They not only took to writing like they were writers, but they also were having fun - almost like they wanted to write.
I started with a picture of kids being mischievous that Corippo had shared (see it here). The students saw it projected on the board as they came in, and it immediately conjured conversation. I then had them recall the eight basic parts of speech and used the poem (linked here) to refresh any rusty recollections.
Then, the fun began.
- caveman sentence (grunts included)
- three verbs - and associated adverbs
- three nouns - and associated adjectives
- pronouns
- conjunctions
- prepositions
- interjections
Some struggled to participate accurately. But, hey, that’s what we were doing this for. They got the clarification they needed - especially about adverbs.
After we completed the template together, they wrote. And they wrote, and they wrote. Not one student struggled to begin or follow through. I was amazed at how they took to the writing.
And the results were spectacular. The writing was much more descriptive and rich than I was used to from my students. (There were some punctuation errors….but one step at a time.) They were using the parts of speech correctly, and their writing was more dynamic. One example follows:
Charles and his acquaintance Bobby crudely redecorate his living room with the thick, white paint. Bobby was at Charles’ house and they were bored, so they decided to have a little fun. All of a sudden Charles’ mom burst into the room and shouted, “Golly!”
Charles looked up from the paint he was now spreading on the small television as terror crossed his face. He was in big trouble. Charles’ mom looked at the room in shock and thought to herself about how the children were being annoying and messy like the presidential candidates she was listening to on the radio just before. She quickly took out her phone and snapped a picture to put on Instagram where she now had a whopping 23 followers! She then walked over to the boys to begin scolding them when she slipped on the still wet paint and face-planted onto the floor. The boys took this as a cue to run out of sight of the angry woman.
The key, clearly, is finding highly engaging media to stimulate their writing. In addition, the expectation for writing is only a paragraph, so students are getting a quick burst of practice. By doing it often enough, I can see that students will become better writers.
If you have used @jcorippo ‘s 8 pARTS grammar to enhance students learning or, if this post has generated some thoughts of your own, please share in the comments. I would appreciate hearing about them.
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