The Grip

The Journey to Write: A Roadmap for Successful Writing

On the road from scribbling to writing, children face many challenges, but also great adventures and rewards. For a successful journey to writing mastery, they need both handwriting skills and motivation.

Skills

If you want to develop good writers, you must first develop good handwriters. Regardless of grade level, children need developmentally appropriate instruction and activities. They need to feel confident and good about writing, or they will steer away from it.

To gain confidence in writing, they need exposure to and practice of fine motor skills.

Children need good grip, posture, manual dexterity and strength for all their writing. These foundation skills pave the way for letter formation, fluency, and automaticity.

When children are comfortable with letter formation, they are better able to focus on the conventions of writing including spacing, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar. When these skills are automatic, children won't struggle with handwriting. They will instead find joy and ease in expressing themselves, creating stories, organizing their thoughts, and sharing information.

Motivation

Along with foundation skills, motivation is the engine that drives children on their lifelong writing odyssey. Encourage children to discover topics that energize them. Let them write about topics that they think are funny, exciting, silly, or inspiring. Also, think about what inspires both girls and boys.

Consider these motivators:

• Movement: Have children act out their stories or elements described in their writing.
• Curiosity: Children are curious and want to know things, so discuss what they are writing about and encourage them to research and find answers to their questions.
• Engagement: Children need to be engaged and interested in the world in which they live. Have them write about their pets, their families, their travels, and other meaningful topics.

There are so many ways to inspire the drive to write and provide practice opportunities for writing skill. Try the activities below in your classroom and rev up your students' writing. These activities are shown with recommended modifications for both younger and more advanced students.

• Mystery Box   (all grades)
• Story Starters   (all grades)
• Silly Sentences   (grades 1+)
• In the News   (grades 2+)