Schoolchildren wearing blue writing sentences with pencils in notebooks at school.

5 Tips for Teaching Foundational Writing Skills That Stick

There’s a whole lot of talk about teaching foundational skills for reading. But foundational writing skills are largely skipped. And yet, teachers everywhere want to bang their heads against the wall every time students write incomplete sentences, sentences that don’t even make sense, or leave off punctuation entirely.

But even when teachers spend time explicitly teaching these skills, there still seems to be little to no application in student’s everyday work. When the teaching day is already far too jam-packed, thinking about fitting in even more time for this foundational writing work can be maddening.

Even more so when you talk to teachers in grade levels before you, only to find out they, too, taught the very same things.

Why aren’t kids applying what’s been taught? Why do we have to keep teaching it year after year?

Well, there are a few big reasons. Knowing these reasons can change the frustrating results we see.

Reason #1: Isolating the teaching–and keeping it there

Teaching the concepts–things like how punctuation works and where it goes is step one. Which needs explicit teaching. But if we never move past the slides or isolated skill practice–sentence work that is far removed from students’ actual writing–it’s unlikely to transfer.

Step two in teaching how these foundational skills work is to model it. Not just explain it, as we do with an example on a slide, but actually model it in our own writing. This takes virtually no time at all, and is easy to naturally embed into whatever kind of writing you’re modeling for students. It’s a matter of pointing it out and explaining what you’re doing and why as you write.

Step three, then, is for students to do this same work in their own writing. If they never apply the skills you’ve taught to their own writing, we can’t expect them to learn it.

Reason #2: Not holding students accountable

Practice is one one part of the equation. But after teaching, it needs to become an expectation. Every time they write, every subject, every day. I say much more about this in this earlier post.

This might seem like a headache, and I’m not going to pretend it’s not. When 27 students are all turning in work that has glaring sentence-level issues, it’s much easier to shrug and say “they just aren’t getting it.” It’s far more challenging to relentlessly hold them accountable.

Because if students have gone through years of school with no daily accountability; if teachers throughout the years have never made them correct what was incorrect–every day–then students have built a very strong, deeply ingrained, bad habit. And habits are very hard to break. So when they get to the upper grades, it takes a teacher with a dogged relentlessness that few are willing to uphold.

Reason #3: Only teaching writing foundational skills in ELA

The teaching day is like a pie chart. It’s divided into lots of sections. ELA is a larger section, for sure, but the schedule still also includes many other subjects. Now imagine we zoom in to that ELA slice of the pie. The majority of lessons tend to be centered on deepening comprehension, vocabulary, spelling, and writing lessons. The amount of time spent dedicated to sentence writing and development is quite small in comparison. In reality, it’s the tiniest of fractions.

Now, consider that tiny fraction in relation to the whole day. The whole week. What’s going on in the other pieces of the teaching day? Likely lots more writing. Or, at the very least, lots more opportunity for it.

That’s why bringing sentence writing work (and expectations!) into other parts of the day matters. It allows for much, much more practice opportunity. And it helps send the message that attention to grammar, punctuation, and capitalization are an ongoing part of all writing, not just during ELA. I’ve found it to be a telltale sign that kids think this only matters in ELA when they say they’re “saving it for when they’re done writing.”

Reason #4: Their oral language skills are far behind their writing skills

I almost put this one as reason #1. It is absolutely true that the more used to speaking in full sentences kids are, the more likely they are to write them. Joan Sedita says much more about this on her Keys to Literacy blog here.

But the reason I didn’t is because so often, years of limited practice and lack of accountability are so often the larger culprits. Not to dismiss the criticality of oral language development–that’s crucial. But when the same, low-level things have been taught, year after year (ending every sentence with punctuation, for example), it points more to lack of practice and accountability than anything.

It’s worth noting the level of complexity students speak with. You could script out a Socratic Seminar conversation, a book club conversation, or even a partner conversation. You might make a quick checklist that just says “one to two word,” “phrase,” and “full sentence” and check off what you hear across a week. You could even dig much deeper, and conduct an assessment, like the CUBED-3, which includes oral language skills.

Or make it simple. Just paying attention to when your students give short, 1-2 word responses and insisting that they respond with a full sentence instead will go a long way. This again takes a relentless effort in holding them accountable. It also means staying consistent so they know it’s an expectation and aren’t left to guess when they’re supposed to be clear and when they don’t have to be.

The bottom line…

Ensuring that students have ample and consistent opportunities to apply the foundational writing skills we’ve taught–in all writing across the day–is the key to making it stick. It doesn’t mean we add more lessons. It means embedding what we’ve already taught in our lessons into all writing, all the time. It means a relentless effort in holding them accountable, in every grade.

That’s the key to avoiding the constant need to start over with the same skills every single year. It’s how we’ll finally move students from knowing what to do to actually doing it–consistently and independently. That’s how we’ll not only improve but also increase the level of their skills, and not stay stuck at the same basic level year in and year out.

Annoying? Yes. Easy? Kind of. But important? Absolutely.

Coach from the Couch is here to help you through virtual coaching!

Who is Coach from the Couch? I’m Michelle Ruhe, a 25+ year veteran educator, currently a K-5 literacy coach. I continue to learn alongside teachers in classrooms each and every day, and it’s my mission to support as many teachers with this hard work as I can.