Just Looking

The more I teach, the less I teach. The longer I want students to remember something the more I really try to let students work things out for themselves. Two of my current classes (hello grades 7 and 8 at Yokohama International School) are working on different writing assignments. One class are writing magazine articles and the other essays about literature. These are different types of tasks for different audiences but there are certain things that you always need to remember.

You need to start well.

You need to think about the audience and purpose of the task.

You need a plan.

You need to use the right ‘register’

But here I go giving a whole lot of instructions. I remember being told by teachers, plan, plan , plan, you need to have a plan. I liked writing (at least in secondary school I did) but I hated being restricted to the teacher’s plan. I used to start planning, then run out of steam, then just start. So now I often get my students to just start, just start writing and then as we are going along we look at planning and topic sentences and thesis statements and all that stuff.

You can of course find loads of advice about writing essays online. Essays are still the thing that most students find themselves doing for most of their education, therefore it is no surprise that it is easy to find a lot of advice on-line.

Click here for a link to lots of links with lots of good advice:

There is a really good one.

It has a really nice clickable way of looking at the different elements that put together create an effective essay. You may need to install a plugin called shockwave to view this but I got it to work eventually.

I will add some writing plans and frames that my students created soon.

cc

Trackback URI | Comments RSS