Keep Students’ Writing Skills at Home (FREEBIE!)

writing

Keep Students’ Writing Skills Sharp at Home

When our students work incredibly hard to gain skills during the school year, one of our biggest fears as teachers and parents is that those skills will be lost over the summer, winter, or spring breaks. Striking a balance between allowing students to decompress during their time off while also ensuring that their new knowledge is kept sharp can be a challenge! Luckily, though, there are some easy ways to keep students’ writing skills strong during their time off while still leaning into the fun and freedom of their breaks!

Here are four tips for making at-home writing practice a breeze (and at the end, we’ll even provide a FREEBIE)!

1. Find out what your student(s) actually want to write about over their breaks.

If we want students to excitedly engage in any type of academic practice during time off, we’ll want to look for ways to make the work feel a little less like, well, work. This can be quite easily achieved through observation of the activities that your students are engaging in over the summer.

Are they playing a particular video game? Binge-watching a show? Is there a book or book series they can’t put down? Do you have any events or vacations planned? Keep a running list of potential topics of interest for students to engage in both physical and verbal writing practice over the breaks (yes, even the act of verbally rehearsing well-structured sentences can be excellent for skill-sharpening!). Then, let them choose what they want to write about or talk about when the time comes for practice.

2. Look for ways to naturally weave this practice into your daily (or weekly) activities.

Do you gather around the table to eat dinner in the evening? Play a family game once a week? Look for times when you could easily incorporate a quick writing task or discussion into the activities you are already doing. For example, you and your student(s) could each take turns expanding a kernel sentence (in other words, a very simple sentence) out loud in the car or at the table. Come up with a simple sentence like, “Today was a notable day,” and then take turns expanding the sentence using the conjunctions “because, but, so.” Challenge your students to think of a new ending to match each conjunction. For instance, they might say: “Today was a notable day because I got the chance to eat my favorite meal,” “Today was a notable day but tomorrow is likely to be even more remarkable,” “Today was a notable day, so I think I will journal about it after dinner!” Not only will your students be practicing sentence expansion, you might also learn something new about their experiences!

You can also give them kernel sentences that are still simple but are more specific to the activities or content they are engaging with over their time off. For example, if you have been listening to a nature podcast together in the car, give them a kernel sentence that relates to the content you heard and that you know they could expand with the information they learned from the podcast (e.g.: “Sea turtles are endangered.” Can you expand that sentence using the subordinating conjunction “while?” Students reply, “While sea turtles are endangered, there are many rescue organizations that are doing their part to protect this animal and their nests.”)

If it feels authentic and easy to implement for your students to keep a journal (either physically or digitally), do it – and do the same with them! Each day before bed, or after you watch a TV show, you could all do a quick writing activity in your journals and share them with one another. (We’ll provide a few journal ideas for you in the FREEBIE that accompanies this post, so read on for that!)

Just make sure that this never feels like a chore – rather, it should feel like a new habit that your family is building. Keep the topics fun, provide lots of choice, and make sure you do it, too – it will feel less like homework if this is a shared activity.

3. Let your students choose how they want to write.

When you are asking students to keep a journal, write a letter, or do some other type of non-verbal writing activity, let them choose if they would like to do this physically or digitally. Some students might prefer to have a journal that they can personalize (hello, stickers!), while others might loathe the act of writing by hand and prefer to type and/or use assistive technology (AT) tools. Some students might enjoy practicing their cursive, while others would opt to use a speech-to-text tool built into GoogleDocs and then edit their work from there.

Let your student choose – and show interest in their preferred writing method. Let them show you their journal, or explain how they use AT to help them write. This not only allows them to write in the way that works best for them, it also gives you the opportunity to learn more about who they are as a writer.

4. Celebrate students for their work over the break!

Students are more likely to engage in activities when they understand the “why” behind them. Each time your student(s) engage in a writing activity (either verbal or written), cheer them on for keeping their writing skills sharp! By putting in this effort over their break – even just for a few minutes a week – they are setting themselves up to be able to smoothly enter back into writing in their classrooms.

We hope that this list is a helpful starting point for incorporating fun and simple written expression practice into your students’ vacation days. We’ve also created this School Holiday Freebie to give you some writing topics and activities that you and your student(s) can do. Just be sure to modify the activities to match tasks that you know your students have received instruction on during the school year, and that you know they will be able to successfully accomplish on their own If you aren’t sure what writing skills your students covered during the previous school year, we encourage you to reach out to their teacher!

And if you’re looking to teach your students new writing skills their breaks, check out the Writing Our World™ Basic Units on our Teachers Pay Teachers Store. These easy-to-deliver lessons give you everyrthing you need to help your students make measurable progress – and can easily be provided by parents and caregivers at home!

Wishing everyone fun-filled (and writing-rich) school breaks ahead,

Kait Feriante

Founder & Co-Author of Writing Our World™

[email protected]