Writing on Command

 By: Sarah Stratton Does narrative length matter? Yes. It matters. Even though the ATLAS rubric does not mention length and even though our standards do not specify length–length matters. Last school year, teachers were invited to meet virtually with Cambium over the course of five days. Teachers came back to their schools with lots of notes. What we learned– “The longer narratives tend to get the highest scores. Students must develop the plot fully…” “If your writing is too brief, convention scores tend to be lower. There is less to score, so if you mess up, it hurts.” Okay–then how long is good enough? Since we were not provided narrative students samples, my students and I delved into the informative and argumentative student samples; we discovered that length does matter. The student samples that scored higher were longer. My students counted the words and came up with a range for their grade level. The perk of conducting this activity with my students–they got to personally se...

  What Can We Learn From One Who Grows Writers? By: Sarah Stratton What is the best way to teach writing? This is the question of the hour. We are all wondering– where do we start?   I’ve pondered long and hard on WRITING since retirement. How do we best teach writing, so students actually become better writers– especially when most students hate to write? We’re taught to TEACH (for the most part–experience is probably our best teacher.) We know more about teaching READING. However, we are not really taught how to teach WRITING. We know grammar and punctuation matter. We know  the organization of a paragraph and of an essay matters. We know sentence variety matters. We also know this ISN’T ENOUGH because students can get all of this and still not be able to write.  In my pondering, I have realized that TEACHING WRITING is not enough. We also have to GROW WRITERS . And we can only GROW WRITERS if they want to write. If they like to write. If they become writers , n...