Teaching Students to Add Details in Their Writing

Moving beginning writers and ELL students beyond single sentence stories can be a tremendous challenge, but also one of our greatest joys. In this first video, Joan works with four of her very beginning Kindergarten writers. She builds on their first goal of being certain their writing makes sense, then layers on a new goal of adding details to make the story more interesting. Joan releases two students at the end of the video, but continues to work with the two who have a bit more stamina.

In this second video, Joan continues working with a small group of her youngest students during Work on Writing during Daily 5.

In the first video of this series, Joan met with 4 of her Kindergarten writers with an emphasis placed on writing longer stories by adding details. After sending off the first two of the group with the least amount of stamina, the two remaining stay to continue focusing on their own writing and adding details.

As you listen in, you will notice that Joan has had Anisha mark one of her pieces of writing with a green dot at the top corner of the page, indicating she wanted to go back and revisit the story to make changes. As is typical of very young writers, Anisha was unable to remember or read what she has written. Rather than make a big deal about the lapse, Joan coaches Anisha to think back to the story, and add new details that make sense on the following page.