12 Ways to Bring Informal Writing to Your Classroom
12 WAYS TO BRING INFORMAL WRITING TO YOUR CLASSROOM BIG IDEA: Looking for ways to include more varied forms of writing or writing analysis in your classroom? We've got you covered with our very own OER Project teacher choice board. Require a claim about today's lesson as students' exit ticket. Get students to analyze voice and tone using a paragraph written by Al (it's fun to critique the LLM). Give students a menu of sentence starters to kick off paragraph writing at the end of a lesson. Assign one student the role of Class Historian for the Day. They get to write a paragraph of what occurred in class and back it up with evidence. Rotate the job through the class to create a funny book of moments to share at the end of the year. Instead of grading in a vacuum, have one-on-one conferences where students talk you through their writing process. Discuss the rubric along the way and offer coaching to strengthen the draft. Go Deeper Provide students a word bank before they write a paragraph or longer-form piece. Review a course article together as a class and highlight features of strong writing. Get students into small groups and tell them to think aloud as they gather evidence for a writing prompt. Set up a draft swap: Get students to swap with a peer and revise a piece of writing focusing only on one rubric element. Then, have them swap with another peer to focus on a different element of the rubric. Return the draft to the writer so they can review and revise. Review sample writing together as a class, and then have students write a response to the author agreeing or disagreeing with their claim and explaining why. Provide colored highlighters so students can find different elements of writing aligned to the OER Project Writing Rubric.What's present? What's missing? Ask students to write a claim about a topic they're studying. Then, they'll swap with a peer and use the OER Project Writing Rubric to provide feedback. Get quick tips to differentiate OER Project materials in your classroom. The OER Project Differentiation Guide will help you meet student needs in the moment and at any stage of writing.