I have several parents ask about how much writing they should expect their third grader to be doing in third grade.Third graders should be writing all the time. Now this can take many forms throughout the day. These are some of the things that I did when I was teaching:
- Journaling is one way. In journaling a student writes thoughts on a certain subject that usually the teacher suggest. Teachers may look at it and comment on it but do not correct any of the mistakes.
- Writing about Reading: We did this very often. Before we read a story we would write a paragraph on what we thought the story might be about. After we read the story we wrote a summary of the story and then a paragraph where we would take an element in the story and compare it to our lives.
- In social studies we wrote in a scrapbook that told of our pretend trip we were taking across the United States.
- In science we wrote paragraphs that explained a certain process.
In all of the above areas we practiced writing a topic sentence that stated the main idea and followed it with facts and details that supported the main idea.
Once a quarter we would have a major writing project that would include writing more than one paragraph. In these projects we followed the writing process of planning, writing, revising,editing and finally publishing the final copy in cursive with no mistakes (or hardly none).
Some of the projects were writing personal narratives, fairy tales, reports on a famous people, persuasive paragraphs and poetry.
There are lots of ways third graders can write during the day. Some of it will be creative and will be not so creative. Any ideas or questions?