Mindprint Toolbox

Search Results

Please wait...

Group Writing

Tags

ELA: Writing ^21st Century Skills Elementary School Strategy

Skills

Flexible Thinking Verbal Reasoning

Group Writing

If your students enjoy group activities and you want to model how to brainstorm and make connections when writing

How To Apply It!

  1. Writing a story together as a class or in partners can ease some initial difficulties and be more fun for young writers.
  2. Constructing a story together helps students learn new techniques for generating ideas, realize that everyone "gets stuck" generating good ideas, and learn to be open-minded about others' ideas.
  3. As a whole group, the teacher can scribe and students can contribute phrases or sentences to construct a story. The teacher can guide the students with prompts as necessary to shape the sequence and details. Teachers could take turns going around in a circle or letting students raise their hands to contribute to a list of ideas. Then the class might vote on the ideas they want to include.
  4. Have students work in partners. They can alternate writing sentences or brainstorm ideas and agree on each sentence. Teachers might can provide a clear guide for the content of each sentence (e.g. one sentence about the setting, another about each character, etc.)
  5. For a more game-like approach, have a student write one sentence and then pass the paper to the next student who reads what has been written and adds his sentence. Students will enjoy reading the final story with a sentence from everyone.

Why It Works (the Science Of Learning)!

Collaborative writing exercises help students get comfortable generating ideas and sharing them on paper. They can be a fun, low stakes way for students to work together and understand that all writers experience similar challenges.