Certificate in Teaching Writing: Grades K-3 Online Course

Growing Young Writers

What makes teaching writing so important for our K-3 students? In our first lesson, we'll discuss the relevance of writing instruction in early elementary school, and we'll look at some practical ways to grow writers in our classrooms. We'll talk about providing role models and celebration and meeting students at their developmental and skill levels. We'll also visit some classrooms to see how teachers apply these strategies with their students!

Growing Talkers

Today we'll look carefully at the connections between oral language and writing. We'll discuss young children's varying literacy experiences at home and how this affects their work when they first enter elementary school; we'll look at specific ways oral language affects writing; and we'll examine strategies for helping students move from oral language to writing. We'll also pop into some K-3 classrooms to visit teachers in action!

Growing Scribblers

In this lesson, we'll begin to explore the developmental stages of writing, starting with the scribbling stage and moving on to the letter-like symbols stage. Then we'll visit a kindergarten classroom and a resource room to get some great tips for working with these young writers.

Growing Explorers

We'll continue our investigation of the developmental stages of writing today. In this lesson, we'll focus on the strings of letter stage and the beginning sounds stage. This is where students begin to explore writing with confidence, which is why we call these students explorers! And as we did in the last lesson, we'll pop into our kindergarten class and resource room to see how our teachers work with students in these two stages.

Growing Risk-takers

What does it mean to be a risk-taker? When it comes to writing, our young risk-takers are ready to make bold choices when they put their pens to the paper. Today we'll look at these two developmental stages: consonants represent words and initial, middle, and final sounds. We'll continue to see students increase their knowledge of sound to letters, learn how to incorporate vowels, and expand the details in their writing. And we'll discuss strategies you can use to help your students achieve this success!

Growing Butterflies

Today we'll explore the final two stages of developmental writing: transitional and standard spelling. The standard spelling stage is our goal for all students, although they'll always be works in progress as they move toward this goal. We'll learn ways to grow these budding butterflies, and we'll visit some classrooms to see teachers in action.

Writer's Workshop

There are many different ways to hold successful writer's workshops! And this will be our focus for this lesson: examining the writer's workshop as a tool to meet the diverse needs of all of our writers. We'll investigate the three components of a successful writer's workshop: the mini-lesson, writing time, and sharing time. And we'll visit with some of our teachers to see how they implement a writer's workshop and incorporate it into their curriculum!

The Six Traits of Writing

What does great writing look like? There's no easy answer to this question, of course. And that's just what we're going to discuss in today's lesson—how to define and teach the traits of great writing. The method we'll review in this lesson is called the six traits of writing. These traits consist of ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. We'll talk about how to teach these skills to writers at every developmental stage—and as usual, we'll visit some classrooms to see our teachers working with this method in action!

Conferencing With Students

In this lesson, we'll be discussing writing conferences. We'll talk about the different types of conferences and how to conduct effective conferences with students at varying developmental levels. We'll also examine rubrics and how to use them to assess student writing. And as always, we'll visit some of our writing coaches to see them working with students in action.

Navigating Roadblocks

So far, we've talked about the traits of good writing and helping students at different developmental stages. But what do we do to help those students who struggle with some of the physical aspects of writing? In this lesson, we'll talk about navigating roadblocks such as trouble with fine motor skills, posture, and stamina. We'll also discuss specific tactics for reversing letter reversals!

Getting Into Genres

Today's lesson is all about genres! We'll look at narrative, expository, procedural, persuasive, and transactional writing. First, we'll discuss how genre study motivates students and increases their writing and reading comprehension skills. Next, we'll carefully examine the components of each genre and how to support our young writers as they write in each of them. And finally, we'll see how our teachers incorporate these genres into their classroom instruction.

Teamwork Gets It "Write": Building the Home-School Connection

We're going to spend our final lesson discussing how to work with parents to support their young writers at home. We'll talk about how to have productive conferences with parents about their children's writing, and we'll examine answers to some common (and often tough!) parent questions. We'll also discuss a great activity you can organize for your students and their parents: Family Writing Night!