Three middle school writing workshop must-haves can start your year off right, no matter if you are teaching in a school building or online. Let’s define the writing workshop model first – it comes down to how time is utilized for the students.
Writing workshop is a method of structuring your course in a student-centered environment where students write often about chosen topics for longer periods of time (a majority of the class period). For this method to work, students must have time, choice and voice in what they write.
Why use a Writing Workshop?
Before we get into what the three things every writing workshop must have, let’s talk about why using a writing workshop can improve not only writing, but student reading as well.
Even when I taught English language arts full time, I taught using the writing workshop model. Early on in my career, I realized middle school children love to talk and express themselves. However, the population of children I was teaching, at that time, did not like to read. So, I taught them to “talk” on paper.
Once students became comfortable with writing more, I taught them writers need to read to find inspiration and to learn what writers do to communicate. We used reading as exemplar texts and studied those texts to become better writers. I chose interesting texts for them to read and used as much enthusiasm as possible in my read-alouds. It worked and my students became more proficient in both reading and writing.
1 Must-Have in a Writing Workshop is TIME
Students need time to write every day. Some days they might have more time to write than others, but students should be writing every day. So, what does a typical 50 minute period look like during writing workshop?
- Writing warm-up that will lead into a mini-lesson – I call these Write Nows (Bell Ringers): 5 minutes
- Mini-Lesson: 5-10 minutes
- Writing (and reading) independently: 25- 30 minutes
- Teacher conferring with writers concurrently during independent writing time
- Share and clean up: 5-10 minutes
This is what most writing workshops look like as far as time allocation goes. I actually move up my share time to be during my mini-lesson, so students will share what they write during a mini-lesson or they might discuss a concept with each other in partners or small groups. So, I often move up 5 minutes to the mini-lesson time, when needed.
Mini-lessons are demonstrating and teaching one concept or skill. I will go into depth with how I teach mini-lessons in an upcoming blog post because I also review previously learned material as well.
If I’m teaching writing every day, then when do I teach reading? Well, I teach reading from a writer’s perspective.
So, let’s say that we are studying mood and tone. To start the workshop, I project a quote on the board for students and ask them to respond in their notebooks to this question: “How does this author make you feel about the topic?”
After five minutes, students share with each other and the class. Then, during the mini-lesson, I teach the concept of mood and tone. I show how a writer creates mood and tone through the narrator’s specific point of view and word choices. We go back to the quote and see how the author created mood and tone.
Next, students write a description from a particular point of view to create mood and tone. They identify what the reader should feel when reading their sentence. Then, students share those sentences with each other and discuss whether or not they created the mood and tone or not. During independent workshop time, students read the story, poem, essay, or article by the author and identify the mood and tone conveyed throughout. Then, students would move on to reading more by the same author and finding other instances of how this author created mood and tone within this same piece. Students would most likely be filling in either a graphic organizer or jotting down notes in their notebooks or a computer activity.
When I refer to writing, I am not referring to answering questions with complete sentences or filling out graphic organizers.
Do you need a little “magic” to help your middle school writers?
Students often do not come to your writing classroom with all the strategies they need to get started with writing. Sometimes they are confused or don’t know what to say. These 5 writer’s tricks are proven strategies I’ve used for years in the classroom, and now I want to share those with you. Contained in this resource you’ll find:
- fun, engaging worksheets
- teacher tips for implementing these 5 tricks
- how-to videos that demonstrate how I teach these 5 tricks
- easy-to-use rubric
