Guidebook Offers Tips for Teaching Young Writers

For primary students, writing can take many forms: drawings, scribbles, recordings, and text that goes every which way. The challenge for teachers is to see the experimentation and playfulness of young writers not as errors, but as ways of learning.

Seeing With New Eyes cover Seeing With New Eyes is designed to do just that. The popular guide to teaching and assessing beginning writers has recently been revised. The sixth edition will be available this summer.

Designed as part of the 6+1 Trait® Writing model created by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, the guidebook helps teachers use the traits of good writing as a framework for instruction and scoring of prewriters as well as competent ones. While the main audience for the publication is teachers of kindergarten through second-grade students, the model can also be used effectively by teachers of older youngsters in special education and limited English proficiency classes.

Peter Bellamy, the Laboratory's writing assessment and instruction trainer, updated the book, which was last published in 1999. Among the changes he incorporated are new scoring guides that are geared to giving effective feedback on a wide range of work samples—pictures, oral presentations, lists—that fall under the heading of "communication." He stresses that it's "really important to start using the language of writing from the very beginning of a child's education, and to use it consistently in all subject areas." Bellamy points out, "As we move to standards-based curriculum, it's difficult to find time just for writing. So, it's effective to incorporate writing in the content areas, connecting it with all the other things the students do. This provides a real context for writing." For example, a kindergarten science lesson about worms could include written or oral observations that integrate trait concepts such as ideas and details, and choices in descriptive words.

Using the traits helps teachers focus their instruction, identifying the specific characteristics that contribute to good writing. When students clearly know the criteria that their writing will be judged on, Bellamy says the need for guesswork is removed and the results are better. "We encourage teachers to use the scoring guides as an instructional tool," states Bellamy. "We've gone beyond assessment for learning to assessment as learning."

Seeing With New Eyes is used as the basis for a one-day inservice workshop for individual districts and also is part of the 6+1 Trait® Writing Assessment Introductory Institute. To learn more about the workshops, see www.nwrel.org/assessment/trainings.php?odelay=0&d=1&t=53 or contact Sharon Northern at 800-547-6339, ext. 572 or northers@nwrel.org. For information on purchasing Seeing With New Eyes, sign up for our Products Alert Mailing List at www.nwrel.org/comm/catalog/.

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