How to Help When Students Struggle to Express Themselves in Writing

Students that I work with in Reading also struggle to express themselves in their writing. As reading fluency improves, it is important to begin to work on writing about our reading. Teaching writing is an area of challenge for many teachers. It was not an area of emphasis in my pre-service teaching education, and it isn’t for most. I wanted to share some tools that I have found that have helped my students become better writers and have helped me be a more confident writing teacher.

In this 2021 article by Chandler, Bourget, and Reno, Intensive Intervention Practice Guide: Explicit Instruction in Sentence Combining for Struggling Writers, the authors provide an evidence base for the effectiveness of explicit instruction in sentence combining for students with language-based learning disabilities. The table on Page 16 of this article provides an especially helpful Instructional Sequence for teaching sentence combining which can be used in any content area or with any curriculum. As a regular routine, sentence combining can be taught in bursts of 5-10 minutes during Language Arts or other content area instruction.

As a 1:1 Tutor for students with multiple challenges, the article got me thinking about how best to incorporate Sentence Combining into my lesson routine. Once my students are approaching reading fluency, how best to instruct them in writing so that they can express their original ideas about what they have read?

One resource that I use often is the Sentence Writing Routine created by The Stellar Teacher Company. These lessons contain engaging photo prompts. The lessons have been created to teach students to construct a variety of sentence types, to identify and complete sentence fragments, to combine sentences, and to unscramble sentences. The routine can be used over the course of a week in short bursts or as a longer sentence writing exercise.

The Instructional Sequence in the above article reminds me to be more intentional in my instruction. From now on, I will choose Sentence Combining as my area of writing focus with most students. I will use the Instructional Sequence to set a goal for each lesson and explicitly teach to that goal. We will eventually work to generalize the skill of Sentence Combining to writing about our reading, but for now I have evidence that this is the place to start.

Thanks for reading! I look forward to reporting back to you all on how this is going for my students. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Lynn Nichols

https://sanddollartutoring.com/