Raise your hand if this sounds familiar to you; when informing students to take out their pencils for the writing block, you are met with groans. Honestly, I can not say that I blame our students for not being fan favorites of writing. Writing is hard and is a ginormous challenge for some of our kiddos. Many students lack the writing stamina and baseline writing skills to sustain a full writing block. So how do we as teachers help our students climb the writing mountain? I’ll tell you teacher friend the secret sauce is to use writing prompts for 3rd grade students. Want to know another secret? You can start easily using writing prompts for 3rd grade in your class right now and see a massive impact with your kiddos. Don’t believe me that the trick to squashing your students' writing class dread can be as simple as using writing prompts? Well, it is! Scroll down to read my top 3 tips to easily increase your students' writing skills using writing prompts for 3rd grade.
Tip #1 to Increase Writing Skills with Writing Prompts for 3rd Grade: Set Writing Goals
"If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else" Lawrence J. Peter. Goals are an essential key to great success. If we want our kiddos to reach great heights as writers and capture more lightbulb moments, then we must outline a clear path for them. Try setting a goal for your writers. You can set a goal as a class to increase your writing stamina. This is an excellent lesson in goal setting as well as providing your students the opportunity to set and reach a collective goal. Pro tip: using a big visual anchor chart is a stellar motivator! You can check out the writing stamina goal-setting tools that I use by clicking HERE.
Goal setting is an extremely powerful tool to help your students improve their writing skills. My favorite method for writing goal setting is using writing prompts for 3rd grade. Each month my students get a new monthly writing journal. This journal is filled with engaging writing prompts for 3rd grade students and a goal-setting page. Each student has different strengths and abilities. Some master writing dialogue quickly, and some struggle with basic sentence structure. Since each student's writing skills vary, so should their writing skills goals. Chat with your students about their amazing strengths as writers and areas in which they can grow. Write it down and get them set to work on reaching that goal. Have these powerful goal-setting conversations with your students, you will be truly amazed at the impact that it has on them! That is why I love using monthly writing journals filled with writing prompts for 3rd grade. It builds in a routine of hitting pause, checking in with my students, and setting or adjusting their writing goals. These goals help them create clear targets for where they want to be as writers. Each day when they open their writing prompts for 3rd grade writing journals, they see the goals that we set together and are reminded to keep working on them even if they are hard. If you want to explore the monthly writing journals and goal-setting pages that I use you can CLICK THIS LINK.
Tip #2 to Increase Writing Skills with Writing Prompts for 3rd Grade: Weave in Writing All Day
When writing is a stand-alone block in your school day, it can easily get a big target on its back. Writing can be so challenging for our students and pinpointing all the writing focus at one time can easily build a dislike for writing as a subject. Why not try weaving in small writing activities throughout our day? When we incorporate writing into our daily routine in fun bite-sized activities, our students slowly learn to enjoy the subject without even noticing! If that isn't a big enough win, you can rest easy knowing that weaving in additional writing activities throughout your day will dramatically increase your students' writing skills. You can start incorporating writing in exit tickets, silly story brain breaks, and morning meeting activities too! There are countless ways to build little writing skills boosters into your tight schedule with ease. Let’s take a look at morning meeting as an example. You can use no-prep writing prompts for 3rd grade as an easy morning meeting activity each day! For example try using the “would you rather,” writing prompts for 3rd grade to boost opinion writing skills. You can have each student write down their three reasons for a would you rather prompt on a notecard. Then have students buddy up with someone with the opposite opinion as theirs for a quick share and debate. Another way you can use no-prep writing prompts for 3rd grade as a morning meeting activity is to use a writing prompt as a discussion question. Then use that same writing prompt for 3rd grade during your writing block for your quick write activity. Writer's block or brain freeze is something so many students face every day during quick write time. When you verbally discuss a topic in morning meeting, you are priming the pump for students to expand their thinking on the subject when it is time to put pencil to paper and share their thoughts. I love using writing prompts for 3rd grade in this way because it is a seamless differentiation strategy that allows all of your students to be massively successful during writing block warm-ups! When students are not worrying about what to write anymore, they are free to focus on their craft and their writing goals, thus improving their writing skills in small ways every single day. Want to start using the writing prompts for 3rd grade that I use and weave in throughout my day? CLICK THIS LINK.
Tip #3 to Increase Writing Skills with Writing Prompts for 3rd Grade: Make Writing Fun, Not a Chore
If we want to increase student writing skills? Make writing a fun and desirable task, not a chore! We have discussed that many students dislike writing because it is hard. That is true but many students also dislike writing because they find it boring. When our kiddos are disengaged in an activity or task, they put in the minimal effort required to get the task done and out of their way. That is the last thing we want to instill in our writers! To build a love of writing we need to spice up the seasoning and boost that engagement baby! The easiest way that I have found to boost writing engagement is to use what I like to call “got to talk about it,” writing prompts. When I ask my students to write about a superhero pumpkin and a dastardly farmer, or a treasure hunt with a secret map, or what they would do if they were principal for a day, they are simply bursting to share! When the writing topic is engaging, students want to write because it is their ticket to sharing their thoughts and ideas with others. I have a million and one things on my teacher-brain at all times, so I rely on engaging no-prep writing prompts for 3rd grade to save me in the engagement department. We use these writing prompts as writing warm-ups, skills practice, and exit ticket shares. When our kiddos enjoy what they are writing about they increase their efforts and work harder on showing and practicing their writing skills. I love using writing prompts for 3rd grade to get my students excited about writing and working harder on mastering their writing skills. If you want to explore my favorite engaging writing prompts you can CLICK THIS LINK now. You can also check out my other writing tip blog posts by clicking here.
There are countless ways to use 3rd grade writing prompts to increase the writing skills of our students. I hope you enjoyed reading my top 3 favorite tips for increasing student writing skills using writing prompts for 3rd grade. Would you like to try a FREE sample of the no-prep writing prompts that I love so much? Then keep reading!
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