Promoting Motivated Writers
In a classroom environment, teachers modify their lessons to meet their students’ individual needs. In order to create motivated learners, the teacher must know and identify the student’s ability level and interests. The student’s grade, ability level, and age will determine the curriculum they receive. As students transition through grades, there are state standards that must be met and they vary from state to state. Teachers must provide developmentally appropriate learning materials and opportunities to students during different stages to increase their writing ability.
The lessons that educators teach have targeted areas that include phonics, fluency, and comprehension to improve their writing skills. It has been said that the most important skills in one’s education is reading. If the child develops the ability to read at a young age the better, “Because reading is a foundation for a wide variety of school subjects, poor reading adversely affects a child’s general school performance and frequently his or her feeling about school”(sde.CT.gov). With the appropriate instruction, kindergarteners begin to learn how to write and dictate words and letters. In this particular grade, children work on interaction with others as well as work with words, letters, and sentences. According to the Hubbard’s Cupboard, the basis of Language Arts for kindergarteners goals include identifying uppercase and lowercase letters, distinguishing letters from words, and being able to identify front, back, title, and author of a book (Curriculum Goals). The kindergarten’s classroom environment should be enriched with literature to help promote eager learners. Nellie Edge who is a kindergarten teacher and literacy coach explains that, “Engagement with delightful and informative literature provides the foundation for building strong writers and readers. Research consistently supports positive literacy gains from access to extensive libraries”(Edge). In a kindergarten classroom everything should be labeled, so they can learn to write the words out. As a teacher, one must demonstrate how to write while encouraging the students to write as well. According to a college student, Janette L. Blecha, “Children taught to write in kindergarten learned visual discrimination skills more readily. This occurred because writing also encouraged cognitive processes that in turn produced higher levels of learning”(Blecha, 6). The student’s writing process will be successful later in life if it is taught in an appropriate way and started at the kindergarten level. The writing process increases with difficulty as the child moves up in his or her grade level. If the teacher is welcoming and promotes children as writers in kindergarten, children will move forward in their literacy skills. In third grade, the writing process starts to build. Students begin to develop strategies to address topics, create detailed sentences, paragraph organization, and development. By this stage, third graders should be introduced to different options of writing such as compositions and letter writing. There are many topics that the teacher should address to develop their students into effective authors. With the guidance of a teacher, the students will learn how to organize their thoughts, compose a draft, and make sure their point is clear. As stated by two teachers from Colorado, their third grade class objectives include identifying a topic sentence, distinguishing topic and detail sentences from each other, and organizing a paragraph with detail and composing and writing a concluding sentence (Pearcy,1). Teachers must make sure their students have adequate exposure to different types of writing. It is essential that the educator models a well-put together piece of literature that the students can learn from. The teacher can then address the class as a whole and ask them to identify the main sentence and how to use it in a paragraph. They will also