Teaching Writing to Young Learners: 10 Online Resources

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Teaching Writing to Young Learners: 10 Online Resources

Posted on 1 April 2016 by Elena Shvidko

Today I will share a few websites that contain helpful resources and materials for teaching writing to young learners.

1. Creative Writing Teacher Resources

This collection of printables, graphic organizers, lesson plans, and activities helps teachers to build learner’ creative writing skills. The resources include poetry writing activities, journal topics, art projects, short-story writing exercises, scoring rubrics, and other printable worksheets.

 2. Essay Punch

This online program offers a step-by-step model for writing an essay, including prewriting, writing, organizing, editing, rewriting, and publishing.

 3. Grades K–5 Penmanship Resources

These resources aim at helping students improve their handwriting. They include learning to write letters with activities for each letter of the alphabet, mastering cursive and free printable books on cursive handwriting, penmanship practice with social studies themes, and exercises for improving hand motor skills and coordination.

4. Paragraph Punch

Similar to Essay Punch, the resource described above, this website guides students through the process of composing a basic paragraph, including a topic sentence, body, and a conclusion.

My comments: This is helpful to high school seniors, who are required to write an English essay when taking the SAT in January or February or/and the CEE in early July.

 5. Posts on Writing Instruction

The author of this blog, Larry Ferlazzo, shares his best posts on teaching writing. He also provides lists of websites helpful in writing instruction.

6. Quality Writing Resources for K–12

This website has a rich collection of materials for teaching writing to young learners. Teachers will find free lesson plans, workshops on a variety of topics, printable worksheets, graphic organizers, writing prompts, word games, writing across the curriculum resources, and more!

7. Spelling Bee

This interactive website is designed for students to help them improve their spelling. The materials are organized according to the levels of difficulty and provide words in the context of a full story. Students will hear the audio (a story) and spell the missing words in the script. The results are calculated after each activity.

My comments: Sounds interesting!

8. Time for Kids Writing Help

This resource includes model papers to help students with writing biographies, book reports, compare-and-contrast essays, personal narratives, and other papers. This website also includes tips from writing professionals on how to beat writer’s block, use prewriting strategies, write introductions and conclusions, and do revisions.

9. Writing Organizers Gallery

This page offers free graphic organizers in PDF format, including “Outlining, ” “Paragraph structure,” “Story pyramid,” “A map to organization,” and others that the teacher can use to help young learners master their writing skills.

10. Writing With Writers

As the website indicates, “Students work with authors, editors, and illustrators in exclusive workshops designed to guide them in developing their skills.” The interactive workshops include biography writing, descriptive writing, news writing, speech writing, and writing book reviews. The website also provides a variety of student model essays.

My comments: I used to teach writing by analyzing model essays

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