Writing: Supporting writing

One of the problems students might have when when writing is getting started. I have set written tasks in class before and watched students stressing over getting started. 

One way to support students is to provide them with a series of sentence stems or prompts.

There is a danger of being over prescriptive, but if you are clear that these are simply suggestions and that the students should only use them if they are having problems, they can be useful. 

Procedure

While students are busy filling in their tables, write prompts on the board to help them get started and help them organise their writing into paragraphs.

I am going to write about an exciting experience I had when ….[when?]

It took place [where?]

I was with [who?]

What happened was that… [what?]

This was because [why?]

I felt … In the end, [result]