Moving Students Incrementally Through Academic Writing

Elementary school writing instruction is crucial in developing students' foundational literacy skills. Research indicates that a structured approach to writing instruction in the early grades can significantly impact students' academic performance and future success.

In grades K-2, the focus is primarily on sentence-level writing and basic sentence combining. As students progress to grades 3 and 4, they should begin to compose basic, but more structured, academic paragraphs. In grades 5 and 6, students typically start writing short essay responses and basic multiple-paragraph essays. This progression aligns with national academic standards and reflects the consensus among professional educators regarding appropriate writing expectations for elementary students.

With users across the country, we at essaypop are uniquely positioned to understand how writing is taught at all levels across the country. We engage in daily conversations with teachers who think deeply about writing instruction, and increasingly, these discussions are with elementary school educators. While there seems to be some level of agreement about grade-level writing complexity, the folks we talk to are by no means perfectly in line with how they deliver writing instruction to younger students. One of the reasons we offer a flexible and customizable platform is that we learned early on that different teachers, schools, and even regions have very different terminologies, color-coding preferences, assessment rubrics, and methods for teaching kids how to write. Levels of rigor and writing expectations are not entirely uniform.

While there is considerable variety and even disagreement on the subject, we've also noticed some consistent trends among elementary school teachers when it comes to how they approach academic writing instruction. It is from these consistencies that we hope to build a unified approach to writing that all elementary educators will embrace.

The most common thread we have found is that teachers who teach grades 3 through 6 tend to, have their students compose writing that does three basic things:

Academic writing for this age group consistently involves the interplay of three key elements: claim, evidence, and explanation. This approach aligns with the standards established for these grade levels. And these elements are not exclusive to elementary writing; they, of course, are also present in the work of middle school, high school, and college students. While more experienced writers manipulate these components in more sophisticated ways, they remain essential building blocks of effective academic writing at every level.

Learning to write when one is young is similar to gaining proficiency in other disciplines, such as math and science. Just as students master fundamental concepts in those subjects and then branch forward, elementary students must master the fundamentals of claim, evidence, and analysis before venturing into more sophisticated types of writing.

The essaypop writing method is firmly rooted in a research-based method that emphasizes a segmented and color-based approach to academic writing, making it ideally suited for elementary school students. This granular approach to writing consistently blends the components of claim, evidence, and explanation, seamlessly stitching them into coherent and polished pieces of writing. Once they have mastered this organizational structure, they can then move on to more complex ones.

In grades 2 and 3, students begin using the essaypop platform to compose simple quick writes. Quick writes allow younger students to jump into the writing quickly and without restrictions. These are shorter, low-stake writing tasks that familiarize students with the essaypop system and build within students a level of enthusiasm and confidence as they answer prompts using a basic, single-frame, approach.

Quick writes can be used for any occasion (warmup, exit ticket, reflection) and can be part of a structured lesson plan or be assigned spontaneously as writing opportunities arise even when not part of the original plan. They can even be set up as timed assignments.

Students are encouraged to share and collaborate in the interactive, Hive environment, and teachers are urged to write alongside their students by creating exemplars. The assessment tool with pre-made rubrics can also be used to assess and score aspects of the finished writing such as organization, coherence, and mechanics. Here’s an example of what such writing will look like.

Once a comfort level has been established composing single-frame quick writes, students move into simple paragraph structures where they state a thesis or claim in one writing frame, provide some sort of evidence or detail to support the claim in the next frame, and then move on to explain or analyze the evidence and tie it back to the claim in the last frame.

This basic three-frame template provides students with the organizational building blocks to begin working with the fundamental elements of academic elements described earlier. This approach can be repeated for several weeks (or for as long as needed) as students grow more accustomed to this kind of academic paragraphing. Again, students can be grouped in the Hive so that they may share and assist each other as they write and when they are finished. The Hive is also where the teacher will monitor student work and progress. Here’s what a completed three-frame composition looks like.

Once students master the basic concepts of claim, evidence, and explanation, they can begin adding elements that will help them craft more sophisticated paragraphs, power paragraphs, and short essay responses. A hook or opening statement frame can be included to engage readers and provide background or context. Additionally, a closing statement frame can be added to summarize ideas, present a call to action, or offer reflection. Students can also incorporate additional evidence that transitions smoothly into the rest of the paragraph or essay, allowing their voices and unique interpretations to come through more clearly and fluidly. This is easily accomplished by adding new frames. Here’s what a paragraph looks like when additional frames have been included.

All student writing is converted in real-time into perfectly formatted MLA documents.

Here is an article that includes a short video you can watch with your students; it explains how the writing frames work.

While the essaypop Lesson Library has loads of grab-and-go, elementary-school-appropriate lessons, and each of these lessons begins with an assigned structure (quick write, simple paragraph, etc.), the essaypop platform allows teachers and students to quickly set up any structure, form, or template that they desire. Let's say, for example, a teacher finds a quickwrite assignment that she likes but would like to convert it to a simple paragraph writing assignment because that’s what her students need. That's easily done by changing the structure in the assignment dashboard. Maybe she discovers a multiple-paragraph essay in the library meant for middle school students but wants to convert it to a paragraphing exercise for her younger students; again this can be done instantly.

Teachers can create their own lessons or upload existing ones using the essaypop lesson creation wizard. If they decide to simplify or enhance the lesson structure, this can be done seamlessly in the assignment dashboard. This flexibility allows educators to tailor lessons to meet the specific needs of their current students. Additionally, teachers can customize the rubrics for assessing writing and the help content displayed in the sidebar for student reference.

The essaypop platform provides two major scaffolding features that students can access as they write. The help content in the sidebar provides students with explanations and models for every element of the paragraph or essay. They are clear, and student-friendly, and students never have to leave the writing area when they refer to them. The sentence starters appear in dropdown windows that descend from every writing frame and provide academic stems and phrases that can help students begin that particular element of the writing. Here’s what these scaffolding features look like.

Narrative and storytelling templates are also organized using writing frames. Of course, the frames represent different components such as setting, dialogue, action, etc. Approaching story writing like this gives students all of the advantages of essaypop, including color-coding, scaffolding, and social interaction and collaboration. Here’s what the narrative template looks like:

The essaypop lesson library has hundreds of lessons for elementary teachers, Simply go to the library, filter by grade level, choose elementary, and you're off to the races. Here are just a few examples of elementary lessons that have been created by our team of National Board-certified teachers --

Life in a Vernal Pool

"Hairs" by Sandra Cisneros

Our Rhetorical Awareness Activities flip the script for young writers. Some activities ask students to add pre-written passages into the appropriate writing frames. Others provide them with partially written paragraphs that students complete. These are perfect lessons for teaching the fundamentals of writing.

Rhetorical Awareness Activity: Earthworms

Know Your Paragraph Parts: Earthworms 2

Essaypop is the perfect solution for elementary school students as it provides them with the opportunity to consistently practice the fundamental components of sound academic writing. When they practice composing strong thesis statements or claims and then support these claims with sound evidence and insightful explanations, elementary kids learn the foundational “chops” that they will build upon as lifelong writers. The platform also allows them to build writing competency step-by-step as they tackle more sophisticated pieces of writing confidently. Essaypop allows teachers to adjust the task to the level that their students require, giving them the flexibility to appropriately control the scope, sequence, and pacing of the lesson as needed for different groups of students. There is no better writing platform for elementary school students.