How to Teach Writing to Middle School Students in 5 Steps

It is a challenge to teach kids to express their feelings, thoughts, and ideas in written form. In the epoch of smartphones and high-speed Internet, it is hard to make a child read a book. Reading stimulates one's imagination and creativity. Poor vocabulary turns into a stumbling block for young writers. Besides, middle school students might have problems with spelling and grammar.

How to teach writing to middle schoolers? Academic experts from the following essay service CustomWritings.com have shared interesting ideas and experiences concerning this problem.

Five Tips for Teaching Successful Writings to Middle-School Students Professional academic writers give five tips to help teachers teach writing to middle-school students.

Tip 1. Make It Valuable

A teacher must explain the value of writing to students. Children should understand why it is important to write. It must not be a single task per semester. There should be literary works, scientific articles, or shreds of evidence to prove that writing is valuable even in the epoch of artificial intelligence.

Tip 2. Provide as Many Samples as Possible

You can search for examples on the Internet or create your own. Samples are to be perfect or close to that. One should spare no efforts to study these examples. One should let students examine the structure of the paper. You should stimulate their logical thinking. It is necessary to teach them to differentiate between narration and a description, between an argumentative and an expository essay.

Bold words are insufficient. It is hard to analyze texts when you are only 10 or 13 years old. The job of teachers is to develop and improve this skill. A sample paper is the best teacher. Students together with a tutor learn

• peculiarities of a concrete essay
• required structure
• necessary details

It is important to present both great and bad samples. Students should see how they differ and why. They analyze both papers and discuss what made a paper successful or awful. This method will help them get an idea about the process of writing and search for appropriate words.

Tip 3. Try to Devote Much Time to Class Writing

The task of homework is to consolidate the class achievement or make a student search for some information to answer a question. Consequently, a teacher should allow students to create more during classes. This is a good opportunity to control and vector the process. Together with other students, a kid will be able to understand why his or her approach was wrong and how to correct mistakes.

Tip 4. Do not Appreciate Laziness and Limits

Sometimes students degrade because teachers welcome cliches and are afraid of challenges. Eventually, their students do not believe that they can do better. As a result, children write banal essays and never try to do more.

Professionals recommend reflecting on writing. Today, one can create a Google Doc and share it with classmates. Everybody would have a chance to comment on the word choice, structuring, and idea presentation. Finally, a teacher can also get access to a Google Doc essay and comment on the essay providing a total conclusion. Such an interaction can positively influence a student. He or she will consider mistakes and correct them. Besides, a tutor teaches students not to be lazy to search for problems and improve their writing.

Tip 5. Grade Each Step

Everybody knows that a person takes several essential steps to create an essay.

• Select a topic
• Study the requirements of the school
• Brainstorm to structure a paper and support ideas with facts
• Write
• Review and edit
• Proofread

To stimulate students’ activity, a tutor should grade each step. In other words, the final grade will depend not only on the outcome. For instance, a student can get 100 points where 20 points go to the topic selection, 20 points go to the structuring, 10 points go to the knowledge of college requirements, and so on. A teacher can announce points gradually or provide them at the end. This approach in teaching writing will keep students’ attention and let them be more enthusiastic.

Homework to Improve Middle-School Students’ Writing

It is impossible to do everything in class. Students are to have home assignments to cope with an essay. A teacher should think of tasks that can push to thinking, analyzing, and free writing.

Inspire them on reading

It sounds problematic but it is possible. The best way is to organize a competition with gifts. The best option is to involve not only students but teachers as well. There should be a concrete task and time frame. Thanks to that, students will learn more words, consider proper punctuation, and get ideas for writing.

Diaries Make Sense

Another variant to stimulate a person’s writing activity is to ask him or her to take notes daily. These could be personal diaries, journals, news, etc. For example, a student can describe events that take place at school or in the community and share them with classmates or in the school newspaper. A teacher can create a schedule for all students so that everyone could have a chance to post an article in the newspaper. Others should read and discuss articles analyzing the best and worst parts.

Group chat

Teachers can use Twitter or Facebook to stimulate students’ writing. The task might be to share life experiences in a group chat or Facebook page and comment on posts.

So, a teacher is to be creative to cooperate with students and make them write top-level papers.