Writing Blog: Helping Students Get Started

As a future language teacher I am constantly looking for resources that will help me shape my teaching style and be the most effective educator possible and many of the articles, discussions, or people that I meet say that writing is an area of the curriculum that poses many problems.The Ontario Language Curriculum  states that students need to become "disciplined thinkers" to be able to write effectively and this comes from being given many opportunities to write (2006). The problem is not that students are not getting these opportunities but rather that they often don't get used to their fullest potential. I have discussed this theory with my fellow teacher candidates and several have said they notice that students struggle to begin writing, but once they start the process is easier. I read a great article on a method to get students thinking before they write here. But I wanted to share a personal example of a method that could help create a balance between overwhelming amounts of choice or lack of freedom in classroom writing.

Last week in my Cognition and the Exceptional Learner course I was placed in a group and we were asked to find ways to use a certain resource or method in teaching language or math. We were given Cubing, a method where the teacher creates a cube and writes a different option for completing a task on each side. We decided to use it to help prompt students to exercise different types of writing. I snapped a picture as we were planning:

As the picture shows, this cube could be easily modified to fit each groups needs and abilities. One cube would have different perspectives to choose from (first person, third person, a dog, a tree) or sentence prompts that can go anywhere in the story, beginning, middle or end. And we would allow each student to roll the cube three times and choose their topic from the three so they wouldn't be completely limited but still have a much smaller amount of choice to pick through.

 I dearly wish I had come across more "games" like this one in my formative years. In my early years of elementary school I spent a couple parts of my day in the "resource" room where I received extra help in writing and math. Anyone who has had this experience will probably agree that its never the place you want to be. Though the resource teachers were lovely people who tried their best to help me, I felt there was always a disconnect between what I learned at resource and what I learned in the classroom. Like my resource teachers had been given incorrect or incomplete information on me. The resource work was far too easy and rarely connected to the concepts I was working on in class and I would be missing my real classwork and feel further and further behind. This was my personal experience and I can acknowledge now that my bouts of self-pity and laziness would keep me from achieving my goal more often than the resource visits, but I still wonder what kind of writer I would be I had had the chance to stay in the class and still learn at the pace that I needed.


Ministry of Education. (2006). Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-8. Ontario, Queen’s Printer. Web. Retrieved from http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/language18currb.pdf