Do your students whine and moan as soon as the words, “writing time,” or “writing workshop” come out of your mouth? Teaching writing is one of the most frustrating and difficult subjects to teach in elementary school. I’ve visited this topic before in my post – 8 Ways to Get Your Students Writing and in How I Use Systems With My 3rd Grade Writers. However, I wanted to dig in a bit on how using daily creative writing prompts helps to stretch my student writers to challenge themselves and build their writing endurance.
And stick around at the end of this post to grab my FREEBIE!
Writing Response Vs. Writing Workshop
FIrst of all, please don’t think that I’m saying responding to a prompt is in any way, shape, or form a replacement for writing workshop. It is absolutely NOT! Writing workshop should remain your core focus for teaching writing. However, writing response time allows students to reflect briefly on one particular question each day that is independent from their writing workshop time.
The main difference is that writing workshop is the time to grow and develop a piece of writing over several weeks. Writing response time is when students can think more deeply about one particular topic for a short time. Writing prompt responses can absolutely be used as a prewriting strategy and these responses can be collected and saved and referred back to when students are ready to create a new piece of writing, but it is not the be all, end all of the classroom writing experience.
Choose a Time For Writing Response…and Stick To It
Whether writing response time happens first thing in the morning or at the very end of the day, it is important for your students to get into a routine. They need to know that THIS is the time we get quiet and we respond in writing to our daily prompt.
Building this routine not only helps your students to know what is to come and what is expected of them, but it also helps to build consistency. If you have a daily writing response time, you as the teacher are more likely to stick with it too. And chances are if students are writing daily, not only with a prompt, but across subjects, they are going to become stronger writers and the growth from the beginning of the year to the end will be exponential!
The more students write, the more their confidence as writers will soar. If students add daily prompt response time to the writing they do in Writing Workshop, to responses to reading, to reports in social studies and science, and writing about how they solved a problem each day in math…I mean…to quote the best musical of all time, Hamilton, by my husband, Lin-Manuel Miranda (*not really my husband – I’m legally required to state this fact), “can you imagine…?”
Provide Prompts With More Than One Question
If there is one thing I’ve learned from sixteen years in the upper elementary classroom, it is that many students will do the barest of minimums if you will let them. Prompts that say: Write about your favorite holiday, for instance, often result in writing that begins and ends with, “My favorite holiday is Christmas.” or “I love Halloween.” If we want kids to write more, we have to challenge them.
We already know that asking closed-ended questions that students can answer with a “yes” or a “no” are not enough. However, we need to go even further than asking students to make a statement. We need to dig into their thinking so that they can dig into their thinking. Prompts such as, “The first kite was flown about 2,800 years ago and was likely invented in China. Have you flown a kite before? What was the experience like? Who were you with? Where did you go? If you haven’t flown a kite before, what do you think it would be like? Who would you most like to fly a kite with? If you could fly that kite anywhere in the world, where would it be?” are going to challenge students to go further with their thinking and therefore with their writing.
Creating Writing Prompts For My Students
I have been creating writing prompts for my students for years. I started zeroing in on seasonal prompts about four years ago when I created and released my first Creative Writing Prompts resource. It was February and so my resource was themed to February. And it didn’t stop with one simple question such as, “Do you like Valentine’s Day?” I dug deeper and asked for a lot more of the reasons why behind student answers. These prompts challenged my students to think and put those thoughts down on paper.
It’s been a labor of love, but I’ve finally released a Creative Writing Prompts resource for every single month of the year (yes, even the summer months). And they are each available in print and digital formats. You can see them all in my Teachers Pay Teachers store here: Creative Writing Prompts Monthly.
How Will You Challenge Your Student Writers?
Again, teaching writing can be one of the most difficult, yet rewarding, subjects to teach in elementary school. But the more our students write, the more confidence they will gain as writers, and the more growth we will see!
Did any of these ideas resonate with you? How will you challenge your students to write more? What prompts can you share with your students that will spark their writing creativity? Drop a comment below and let me know!
Grab This Freebie!
Interested in some writing prompts that delve deeper? Check out my Creative Writing Prompts Monthly resources! PLUS – You can get a free sample of each one of my Creative Writing Prompts Monthly resources just by signing up below!
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