In the primary classroom, it is essential to provide emerging writers with opportunities that build both skills and confidence in their abilities. Nothing engages them more than Wixie!
Wixie provides even the youngest learners with a range of options for organizing their writing and options for sharing their own stories, information, and opinions.
Organizing ideas during the writing process
Wixie includes graphic organizer templates that can help students brainstorm ideas, compare information and organize events.
Many Wixie templates, like beginning-middle-end, are often used to assess student comprehension of a story, but make great supports to help students write their own narrative fiction. For example, students can use a cluster diagram to:
• brainstorm ideas
• identify character traits
• record facts
Narrative writing
Support emerging writers using Wixie templates, like sentence strips, to share observations and tell basic stories through simple sentences and supporting illustrations.
You can pair writing with reading to connect students more deeply to the texts by asking them to create their own versions of your favorite pattern stories. For example, read a story like Charles G. Shaw's It Looked Like Spilt Milk and ask students to create their own version using a scaffolded template.
As your emerging writers grow in confidence, ask them to write their own original stories, complete with illustrations and voice narration!
Students can publish their work in print form, or even share as a video or eBook!
Informational writing
Our world is filled with information, amazing people, and interesting animals. Help your students develop a love for sharing their expertise on topics by creating informational texts.
Keep it simple by asking students to retell a single event in a story or from their lives. Then, combine the pages created by each student to create a class book you can print and share in your classroom library or send home as a PDF or eBook they can read with families and friends on phones or tablets.
But don't shy away from students writing their own multi-page informational texts. Break student writing into smaller pieces so they only write a short amount each time. By the end of the month, they will be amazed at how much they were able to write!
Opinion writing
While they are just beginning to write, young students love verbally sharing their opinion about their "favorite" this or the "best" that. Use this to motivate them to write simple sentences that state their opinion about a story or event.
As students gain confidence stating their opinions, build foundations for future argument writing by asking them to follow-up their opinions with reasons and examples.
Pennsylvania educator, Barbara Plum, combined opinion writing with family discussions in Social Studies for a My Favorite Relative writing project. She supported emerging writers by structuring the project so students created pages that:
- stated their opinion,
- shared two or three reasons or examples to explain why, and
- finished with a concluding statement
No matter which type of writing you have students produce, Wixie provides a perfect canvas and suite of tools that will inspire and support them to share their knowledge and understanding as they develop into budding writers.
