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Writing Strategies

Writing Strategies: Two Strategies to Help Young (and old) Writers. In my teaching experience, writing is one of the most difficult things to teach effectively. Teaching effective and meaningful writing in a virtual setting becomes that much harder. In the classroom, it has taken me many years to develop what I believe to be effective strategies to teach writing. Two strategies I encourage to help struggling writers in the classroom or at home: Writing Circles and Writing Graphic Organizers.

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“Writing Wounded” Part One

Writing wounded. What exactly does this concept mean? Many educators, as do I, look at writing as the inverse of reading. If you follow the Montessori method, you discover the fundamentals of writing are taught even before many fundamentals of reading. Writing also happens to be one of the subjects I was given the least guidance in during my teacher training. In my experience, writing is one of the most difficult things to teach effectively. At least, I feel that way at the upper elementary ages.

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Comprehension Thinking Strategies

Written language is a code and children need to be taught how to decode it. Early reading skills include phonics, word recognition, vocabulary, decoding and fluency. But as young readers advance, the development of comprehension skills work differently. Skilled reading is an active process; the reader’s mind is constantly processing information extracted from the text.

There are multiple comprehension thinking strategies available to a struggling reader. Often, many or all of these strategies are working together to assist in comprehension. Here is a breakdown of the seven to which have been found most effective..

Montessori Blog - Skilled Reading Part 1: How do we help older students become better readers? Grumble Services Learning Resources blog

Skilled Reading Part 1

Skilled Reading: How do we help struggling readers? As readers advance, the development of comprehension skills work differently. Research shows older readers possess specific strategies to construct meaning before, during, and after reading a text. I now know this type of reading to be called “skilled reading.”

The key to skilled reading is being capable of recognizing words without relying on context at all. This is one of the most well replicated findings in all current reading research.

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Upward Social Mobility

Upward social mobility: What is it? In this case, leading researchers have divided the population into five categories or quintiles. If you are born in the bottom 20% (experts refer to this as the bottom quintile), upward social mobility is the chance you have to move up to the top 20% (or the top quintile). Another term commonly used for social mobility is inequality.

According to The Brookings Institution, there are multiple layers at work when it comes to our personal social mobility.