Ideas

Selecting the Idea - Students enjoy writing about ideas they care about, ideas they want to share, and ideas that will amuse others. For the most part, children are creative by nature. Mix their creativeness with an original prompt, and it’s a perfect formula for some silly stories. Try Scholastic’s Story Starters to generate some fun ideas to write about.

Elaborate on the Idea - Once students begin generating  ideas and begin putting it all on paper, they should then begin the process of elaborating their details.  TelescopicText is a perfect way to model how a simple sentence, “I made tea,” can be transformed into a detailed and rich multi-paragraph paper. Create your own telescopic text using Word Magnets.

Organization

Teaching Organization - As students begin adding details and language to their narratives, the writing can become unorganized. That’s when the next website jumps in. WritingFun helps students organize their writing using online graphic organizers. This site not only has organizers that students may print or use online, it also has examples of finished products, with embedded information on how the organizer was used. 

Developing the Beginning, Middle, and End - Besides to learning about writing great beginnings and happy endings, students should also be exposed to examples of literature that demonstrate how authors use these strategies in their own writing. You can simply read a book to them or have Al Gore read them Brave Irene. This book, and many others, can be found on StoryLine Online.

Voice

Setting a Mood and Tone - Pictures and music are an excellent media to illustrate this trait. The mood and tone is what makes people cheer and cry at movies. Together, pictures and music can convey feelings at an emotional level that students can see, hear, and most importantly, feel. Rather than search for movie clips that uncover certain feeling, try MoodStream by Getty Images. It’s a powerful tool to inspire the uninspired!

Style to Match the Purpose - The Voice Trait offers the perfect opportunity to integrate art with writing. Colors elicit certain moods, remember the mood ring? Do students know the symbolism, personality, and the traits that colors convey? A writing about characters dressed in black in a foggy gray night can be the complete opposite of characters in bright colors in a sunny blue day. Visit Colors in Motion to watch some movies about colors, and read about the stars (the colors).

Word Choice

Painting a Picture with Words - Once students understand that writing should evoke a tone and have a personality, it’s time to teach the Word Choice Trait. PicLits.com offers an archive of photographs, and a vocabulary rich word bank. Here, students can learn how to create sentences (or even a paragraph) that can bring the picture to life using the right words. Students should focus on details, the little and unusual things.

Words Have More Meanings - Even without the 6+1 Traits of Writing, this is one part of writing that teachers have been trying to conquer over a long period of time. “I was happy,” she wrote. We all know that sentence can be improved through the use of a simple thesaurus. However, try Lexipedia instead. Just type in a word, and in seconds you will have a web of synonyms.

Sentence Fluency

Reading Aloud - “Sentence fluency is the auditory trait.” In addition, Ruth Culham writes, “One of the best ways to teach fluency is to read beautifully written pieces to students.” Audio books are an excellent source for this. Not only are they great models of sentence fluency, they are known to improve listening and comprehension skills, plus increase vocabulary and pronunciation of words. Below is a list of places you can download free audio books:

        RobertMunsch.com

        Storynory.com

        Free-Books.org

        LightUpYourBrain.com

In  6+1 Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide Grades 3 and Up, Ruth Culham describes how to build a “fluency phone.” An alternative is to install WordTalk to your PC. It’s a free text-to-speech plugin for Microsoft Word which allows students to listen to their story, if typed into Microsoft Word. You can download it here.

Conventions

Games to Teach Conventions - Teaching conventions can become somewhat dry. Try using interactive online games instead. After making a simple Google search, I found a couple your students might enjoy playing. In Power Proofreading, students act as proofreading technicians to fix TV scripts, memos, and other writings for a television station. Then there’s Punctuation Paintball, a creative way for children to learn many of the rules of basic punctuation and capitalization.

Schoolhouse Rock! - No explanation needed... I hope. This is a perfect place to integrate music with writing. Have fun and visit Schoolhouserock.tv to links to YouTube videos and lyrics.

Presentation

A Finished Look - Have students be proud of their paper. Neatness counts!

An Interesting Look - I can’t leave the following resource out. Maybe it doesn’t fit here, or maybe it does. However, you just have to give Wordle a try. Wordle creates beautiful word clouds. Simply copy and paste a story into the text box and Wordle will do the rest. The more a word was used, the more prominently it is displayed in the cloud.