A Simple Way to Get Elementary Students Writing Every Day

You’d be hard-pressed to find a teacher who doesn’t want their kids writing more. The problem is that many kids struggle to write on demand—and for a variety of reasons.

Consider the intricate cognitive demands of writing: Students need to master spelling rules, understand the function of punctuation, and be well-versed in sentence structure to write fluently. They need to exhibit self-regulation and cognitive flexibility when they come to a barrier. Integrating writing into science, social studies, or mathematics instruction becomes even more challenging, with students having to recall and synthesize new knowledge in response to an on-demand writing prompt.

To address this challenge, we need to properly scaffold on-demand, cognitive writing for students. Using Stop-and-Jots, students can write for two to three minutes daily—and across all subjects—to gradually build their stamina and capacity for on-demand writing in response to open-ended prompts.

What is Cognitive Writing?

As detailed in The New Classroom Instruction That Works: The Best Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement, by Bryan Goodwin and Kristin Rouleau, cognitive writing engages students in the process of writing about learning, offering students the opportunity to write on demand across all subjects in order to synthesize learning in their own words. This is a categorically different style of writing than what most often happens in elementary classrooms. Typically, teaching writing often happens in one specific time of day by engaging students in genre-based units of study.

While there is certainly value in teaching students how to write personal narratives or persuasive essays, the majority of the writing they will have to do as adults will actually mirror cognitive writing. They will write in response to on-demand prompts by responding to emails, in which they will offer opinions, construct an argument, ask questions to gain clarity, or articulate their thought process.

Most teachers understand this, but many are hesitant to dive into on-demand, cross-curricular writing without a simple and sustainable way to do it. That simple and sustainable way: Stop-and-Jots.

What are Stop-and-Jots?

Put simply, Stop-and-Jots, featured in my book My Kids Can’t Write, K–5, get kids thinking about their learning without raising the demands of cognitive writing too quickly. I have a variety of prompts for stopping and jotting to get you started. These ideas are just to get you started. As you find opportunities, consider creating your own Stop-and-Jot prompts.

1. Stop-and-Jot: A-Ha Moments (Students identify significant realizations or moments of clarification.)

Sentence frame: I realized…

2. Stop-and-Jot: Key Terms (Students document key terms that teachers need students to know and apply in future tasks or situations.)

Sentence frame: _____ means...

3. Stop-and-Jot: Outstanding Question (Students generate questions as they learn with the class, in small groups, or independently.)

Sentence frames: I wonder… I am puzzled by…

4. Stop-and-Jot: New Learning (Students document new learning statements related to the learning target, identifying what they or the entire class has synthesized as a result of the lesson.)

Sentence frame: Today, I/we learned…

5. Stop-and-Jot: Reflection (Students consider challenges, mistakes, or successes and document them.)

Sentence frames: I made a mistake when… I was puzzled by… I fixed my mistake by…

6. Stop-and-Jot: Fun Fact (Students document a fact that sparks their interest that they want to remember.)

Sentence frames: Did you know…? I never knew that…

7. Stop-and-Jot: Big Idea (Students record an enduring understanding or concept.)

Sentence frame: The big idea is…

8. Stop-and-Jot: Feeling (Students articulate a feeling in response to a task or prompt.)

Sentence frame: I feel…

9. Stop-and-Jot: Connection (Students make a connection to their schema.)

Sentence frames: This reminds me of… I already knew…

Students can stop and jot about almost anything they think about, whether it’s a new fact, a connection to their background knowledge, something that’s puzzling them, or even a self-reflection.

For instance, a science teacher can couple self-assessment with self-reflection, using a Stop-and-Jot to help students set an intention for the day. Not only does this provide personalized documentation of a child’s learning journey, but the science of writing tells us that writing about learning will “reliably enhance” the learning process, increasing the likelihood of retention and transfer.

Scaffolding and Gradual Release

Just like anything else we teach, we will have to model, scaffold, and gradually release this on-demand, reflective writing strategy with all students. You might begin by only offering “New Learning” or “Key Terms” to students as they stop and jot. As they become more comfortable with stopping and jotting, provide them more avenues for reflecting, modeling how to write about a “Big Idea” or “Connection” to the core lessons for the day.

Eventually, you can invite students to choose the Stop-and-Jot that feels most relevant to them each day. Some students might have had a major realization, prompting an “A-Ha Moment,” while others might be confused or puzzled, warranting an “Outstanding Question” or “Reflection.”

Keep It Simple with Mini-Journals

Especially if your students are reluctant to write, you will need to keep this simple and engaging. Not only are they kind of cute, but mini-journals create a sense of mastery in students, allowing them to fill up pages quickly. Using this tutorial, you can make a class set of journals with common materials that probably already exist in your school or classroom.

Each day, when it comes time to stop and jot, students can turn to the next clean page and jot down a reflection in relation to the lesson. Place a time limit on their jots (two to three minutes), circulating and scaffolding writing, as needed. When time’s up, invite students to share their reflections with a partner. You might even make time for a handful of students to share their reflections with the entire class.

Keep it Consistent

For this to work, you need to commit to it. At first, your students might not write a lot, but that’s OK. Embrace where they are, and each day provide more writing scaffolds, such as sentence frames, word lists, and/or more models to help them see what it means to write reflectively about their learning.

In no time, your students will make it their own—and trust me, you’ll wonder why you hadn’t been doing this all along.