Parent Letter for Writing
Dear Families,
The school year has only just begun, and I am learning more each day from your children! They’ve taught me what it’s like to visit your grandma at the hospital, to take yoyo lessons from the kid who just moved in next door, and to listen to rain against the bedroom window. I’m learning this from your children, who meanwhile are learning to craft literature out of their experiences.
I want to take this opportunity to tell you about writing time in our classroom. As you know, writing is one of the basic subjects in elementary school. Its importance continues to grow as standardized tests, colleges, and employers demand writing samples as evidence of one’s ability to communicate effectively. I can promise you that in our classroom there will be a great emphasis on writing well. Your child will grow in dramatic ways as a writer.
When you visit our classroom, you’ll notice that we set aside time every day for writing. We refer to our writing time as writing workshop because that’s a term published authors use. It makes sense to borrow their term because the children will follow a writing process used by published authors of novels, poems, short stories, essays, and articles.
In our classroom, the writing workshop lasts for approximately an hour each day. It begins with a 10-minute writing lesson (which we call a minilesson) in which I explicitly teach the skills of good writing. I gather all of the writers for this large group direct instruction, and I teach them a strategy or method that they can use to make their writing stronger, clearer, and more correct. After the minilesson, the children work on their own writing for 40-45 minutes. As the students work, I meet with small groups of writers who share the same instructional needs. I also confer with individuals. After the students work on their writing, I gather them again for a teaching share time. This gives me an opportunity for further instruction and gives children an opportunity show each other what they’ve accomplished.
You will notice enormous growth in your child’s writing this year as we move from one unit to the next during writing workshop. Throughout this first month or so of school, your children will be writing personal narratives, which are true stories from their lives. This unit is meant not only to teach them qualities of good personal narrative writing, but it’s also designed to help them develop stamina, focus, structure, detail, a sense of purpose, an appreciation for conventions, and an enthusiasm for writing.
As the year progresses, your child will learn to write in a variety of genre, including essay, literary essay, short fiction, poetry, and memoir. The year will be divided into month-long units. During each unit, your child will learn more about qualities of good writing and about writing processes. They’ll also learn a variety of strategies to draw upon during each stage of the writing process.
Of course, I’ll also spend considerable time teaching children about qualities of good writing. I am convinced that writing well is a skill that can be taught and learned, and I won’t hesitate to teach children to write well-organized, detailed, compelling texts. I will certainly also teach the conventions of good writing, which include punctuation, grammar, and strategies for accurate spelling. Much of the instruction on the conventions (or mechanics) will take place during our daily word study time, and your child’s growing proficiency with the conventions of writing will transfer into their work during writing workshop. You will see that I encourage children to write first draft writing without belaboring each word, which means that this first draft writing will not be perfectly conventional. Over time, it will be very important that children develop better and better habits, so that it becomes second-nature for them to punctuate, paragraph and to spell high-frequency words correctly. Of course children, will edit and correct their drafts before publishing them.
You may wonder how you can help your child to prosper as a writer this year. The first thing I want to remind you is that for most of us, writing can be frightening. Please encourage your child by helping your child realize that daily life brims with stories that deserve to be told. When your family hears a noise behind the wall and you use a flashlight to find that the noise comes from a squirrel who has been living there, remind your child that this would make a great entry in his or her writer’s notebook! When you get the chance to see some of your child’s writing, for now, it would really help if you give that child what every writer needs above all: an interested, appreciative reader. Read the child’s writing not as a judge, but as a reader, paying attention to the content. If you do this, you will make your child feel like an author, and you’ll make it much more likely that your child will care about writing and will be ready to invest in the hard work required to grow as a writer.
I will be sending a letter home each month to keep you informed about the work we are doing as writers and to suggest ways you can support your child’s writing at home. We will have many celebrations of our writing throughout the year, and you will be invited to join many of them. I will be sure to let you the dates in advance.
We are partners in this incredibly important work of helping your child become a strong and confident writer. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I look forward to our ongoing communication.
Sincerely, Fifth Grade Team