5 Simple Shifts to Engage Young Writers

When I started my career as a first-grade teacher, writing was the most daunting part of my day. My students could barely write a word, much less a story, and often burst into tears at the mention of writing. However, I can happily proclaim that writing is now my favorite thing to teach. Below are the biggest shifts in my instruction that led there.

1. From Graphic Organizers to Checklists

While tools like graphic organizers and story maps do help students organize their thoughts, students can often struggle transitioning to writing without them. I made my lessons more sustainable by switching to a collective checklist for different types of writing. I take everything in the graphic organizer and turn it into a checklist. This way, when a student is done with this portion, they just check it off. For example, in informative writing it would look like this: Topic Sentence, Facts, Closing, with checkboxes for each.

I’ve found that without graphic organizers, students write more. Instead of trying to fit their plot points in a tiny box or cramming three key details into an informational hamburger, they share every single detail they can. While organizers can still be helpful tools for beginners and absolutely set a minimum for writing, they can unintentionally set a maximum that can limit students.

2. From a Rigid schedule to a Student-Led One

Writer’s workshops where you spend one day on each part of the writing process (brainstorming, planning, rough draft, revisions, and publication, illustration, or presentation) offer consistency, but add pressure to have everything ready on a deadline. I shifted this approach after the author of the Narwhal and Jelly books Zoomed with our class during our Genius Hour time and shared how he takes the time to interview his characters before starting to write. He said this part of his writing process guides everything else.

The next week, we spent the entire week just drawing, interviewing, and writing about our chosen characters. Using their answers, students wrote more about their characters’ backgrounds than they had previously written for entire plots. As we moved on to each story element, we tried similar strategies that always began with illustrations first.

There is no deadline, there is no neat structure; we just move on when all our questions have been answered. The detail, the stamina, and the enjoyment all shifted when we stopped the routine and started writing like authors.

3. From Writing to Meet Standards to Writing for Joy

When I ask students what they want to write about, they ramble about dragons, talking animals, silly character name ideas, etc. Creative writing isn’t a first-grade standard, but I’ve made the choice to prioritize joy over end-of-year goals. I’ve found that when I allow student choice into my writing block, it strengthens their writing across all genres.

I make space for student choice and voice in writing through my open-ended writing center, which is just loaded with a variety of blank writing tools, from blank books to blank story paper to blank cards—they can use whatever they choose, to write about anything they want. I also allow them to choose as a class the genre of writing we will work on during our writing block.

Even if a student writes only creative narratives for weeks on end, they still show tremendous growth when asked to write an informational paragraph. When they learn to love writing, meeting writing standards is a breeze. Now, instead of students being scared to start, they’ll tackle a paragraph and then flip their page over to write a narrative where the volcano they just provided facts about comes to life and takes over a village, only to learn that he likes the villagers and becomes a hot tub for them. When I let joy take center stage, my students far surpass the standards I used to worry about so much.

4. From Teacher Conferences to Peer Editing

I used to dread revising and editing day. Students would spend under two minutes on a self-check, even with explicit modeling, then read each other’s writing, while I would spend way too long on one-on-one conferences with a teacher check. A fifth-grade teacher inspired the solution when she complained about how boring all the workbook-provided writing samples were for her students’ editing practice.

I asked if she had time in her schedule to give her students more authentic practice by editing my students’ writing instead. When they came down to my room, I made a big deal about how real authors have editors, and now so do we. We all revised and edited my rough draft as a group so that everyone would understand the expectation, and then I had them work in pairs.

This teamwork gifted my students one-on-one tutors with ample time and care while providing the fifth graders test prep infused with a jolt of excitement around writing as they remembered how creative their younger selves had been. I still have one-on-one writing conferences, but now I get to focus on meaningful feedback about the art of writing instead of being bogged down in tiny details.

5. From Teaching Writing to Writing As a Teacher

Perhaps the greatest shift of all was my own perception of myself as a writer. When I was named teacher of the year at my school, they asked me to apply at the district level. The application was several essay questions long. I felt inadequate, thinking of all my years in school when I identified as a bad writer. I have dyslexia, and spelling has always been hard for me; I thought you had to be a good speller to be a good essayist. I applied anyway, even though it made all my childhood insecurities bubble up inside me, because I believed that the story of my students deserved to be told.

After several such applications, I was announced as the 2024 Louisiana State Teacher of the Year. The process gained me the confidence to stand onstage and read my own written words for an audience. Writing healed the insecurities of the 6-year-old inside of me. It’s not just about spelling, building connections for your reading brain, or writing to inform, to entertain, or to persuade—writing is about how we connect with ourselves. I have to teach my students how to use writing, so that they can see the beauty that lives within them.