Pre-Writing Activities

Thursday, I was working with a young teacher who was having a difficult time helping his third-grade students write about one of the books they were reading in class. The problem was the students didn’t really understand the pre-writing stage of writing about a piece of literature. It is not realistic to tell children to write and expect them to be able to do so. They have to plan what they are going to write. They have to organize their thoughts (often into an outline) before they ever start writing. To help solve this problem I gave the students an interactive writing activity on the computer.


Most children need their hands held through the process approach to writing, and that is exactly what this writing activity does. There is an on-screen guide which walks them through the pre-writing stage step-by-step. The activity even inserted forms right into their document to better structure their thinking and writing. There were drawings they could easily insert into their writing document to illustrate what they wrote. And all of this involved only a few screens, which helped the students without overwhelming them. Now they were ready to write about plot.

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