Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In this episode, I talk about a subject that is near and dear to my heart—-making elementary writing (and learning in general) easier for the littles!

Here is what you’ll learn in this episode:

*The importance of the “words lead to sentences; sentences lead to paragraphs; paragraphs lead to reports, essays, and stories” approach to teaching writing (as opposed to the “100 word” assignment

*How stories (and especially familiar ones) lead to a better outcome in teaching students to outline and write from a given source

*How to pick content to use with the Writing Boxes process—-the importance of focusing not just on “readability” level but also the “write-ability” level of text for students to write from (including the need for simple sentences without too much elaboration so that students can add the elaboration themselves)

*How the Writing Boxes bring in some boundaries that help students focus on one sentence at a time when they aren’t ready for long paragraphs yet

*How amazed students are when they do the Writing Boxes for each sentence of a paragraph then bring those sentences together to create a paragraph that is more detailed than the source they wrote from!

*How much students love doing Writing Boxes

*Why Writing Boxes are the perfect first writing exercises for second and third grade students!

*Oh…and how much full samples/Answer Keys for every single Writing Box sentence so teachers don’t have to have a thesaurus or app open when helping students with Writing Boxes

Find everything you need here!