Review: Six Writing Traits Lessons on Teachers Pay Teachers
The Six Writing Traits Lessons download packet is available for free on Teachers Pay Teachers. The packet contains six lesson plans for teaching beginning readers and writers about aspects of good writing. Each lesson covers one aspect – ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and convention.
The lessons laid out in this packet cover a wide range of story-related analyses, many of which involve being exposed to sample stories. Over the course of these six lessons, students will examine a printed story or excerpt to count the number of sentences and comment on things like varying sentence length; listen to classmates read the same sentence to learn about an author’s voice; discuss how word choice contributes to mental imagery; and write their own class story. All of the six topics covered in these lesson plans are foundational, and the activities do a fantastic job of guiding young minds through the basic but crucial concepts of writing.
The lesson plan packet is marked for kindergarten and first grade classes, but I think the lessons it teaches could be extended to second and possibly even third grades without much modification. Realistically, though, the wide range of literary analysis that the lessons guide students through is important not only for young writers, but intermediate and even advanced writers. And while most high schoolers might not gain anything new from these exact lessons, English instructors may find some ideas in here to remind their teenagers of what makes well-written literature and what kinds of questions go into a literary critique.
You can download your own copy of Six Writing Traits Lessons here.
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Written by Bryan Cohen
Bryan Cohen is the author of more than 30 books, many of which focus on creative writing and blasting through that pesky writer's block. His books have sold more than 20,000 copies. You can find him on Google+ and Facebook.
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