In my three years of teaching, I can count on one hand how
many students would say writing is their favorite subject. Unless it is time to
work on poetry, I can honestly say that writing is not my favorite to teach.
This course has made me think of how my students really feel when I ask them to
brainstorm and put their thoughts into words. For some, this task may be easy.
For others, it won’t be as much. I wonder how my ELL’s feel about it?
FluentU
has provided me this week with wonderful ideas to add to my writing instruction
this year. “ESL writing should be fun and encouraging, though many of us
can remember the boring essays we had to scribble out in school. So break the
mold and put a dash of excitement into your writing lesson.” Some of the ideas
are: having students tweet, writing emails, creating advertisements, writing
informative reports, and crafting a newsletter. I do have my students create
newsletters, but that is about it. We do one advertisement activity a year, but
that is in the form of a brochure. It is a shame that I stuck in my ways of
simply writing a piece, instead of allowing my kids to explore their
creativity, as well. These activities foster creativity, communication,
critical thinking, and collaboration. All of these are things that we learned
are important for working with students, including ELLs.
This
search notification is making me excited to update my writing instruction!
Here is the FluentU website if you would like to read more
about it! https://www.fluentu.com/blog/educator-english/esl-writing-practice/
 |
Resource
Seifert, S. (2020, March 22). 5 Activities Guaranteed to Get
Your Students Excited About ESL Writing Practice. Retrieved June 29, 2020, from
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/educator-english/esl-writing-practice/
I agree with you 100%! I have very few students each year in fifth grade that truly enjoy writing, and it is usually those students that seem to just naturally have a good writing voice and understanding of grammar. I know that writing overwhelms my ELLs, so at times it is difficult trying to provide them with a modified version of an assignment that is still similar to the rest of the class. I think that writing can be made FUN, and I have always been a lover of writing myself. However, I believe it is when I start dwelling on the type of writing that they are going to be asked to produce on things like state assessments that I get scared and start to provide them with a more boring type of writing practice. I would like to recommend this website that I started using with my students this past school year and they love it! Check it out...it's called penpalschools.com. Let me know if you have any questions!
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