Teaching upper elementary students about the writing process can feel overwhelming if you do not have appropriate visual resources to help both you and your students refer back to during any writing lesson or activity. From coming up with ideas during brainstorming to publishing their final drafts, there's a lot for young writers to learn.
How can we make this process meaningful for our upper elementary students to grasp and apply to ANY writing assignment? That's where an interactive writing process bulletin board comes in!
Start the school year by explicitly teaching your students the steps of the writing process. This will help them bring the writing process into every writing assignment during the year. No matter what my students are writing, whether it is a narrative, essay, informative piece, poetry, or a summary of what was read, we take it through the writing process. Knowing what the writing process is, and making it accessible for students is the first step to building confident and able writers in your upper elementary classroom.
What is the writing process?
The writing process is a series of steps that writers follow to create a piece of writing. These steps usually include prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. I also include two additional steps: peer editing and teacher conference after the editing step and an author's share after the publishing step.
What are the five parts of the writing process?
Introduce this process during the first few weeks of school. Start by explaining each stage in simple terms: brainstorming ideas during prewriting, getting thoughts down on paper in drafting, improving content in revising, correcting errors in editing, and sharing the final piece in publishing. Use relatable examples and interactive activities as you introduce each step. If you are going to include a peer editing step, explain that this is the time that students help one another edit and revise their work. An author's share is any way that you pick for students to share their writing. You can display their writing, have everyone share their writing piece with a peer, or randomly select a few pieces to be shared with the whole class.
💡Try this idea at the beginning of the year to help students understand the steps of the writing process! Share a "this or that" question and have the students agree on a response to answer the question. Then, brainstorm supporting ideas as a group, write a quick draft, and work together to revise and edit your piece. By doing this, students can see how the writing process helps transform their initial ideas into polished pieces of writing, all through your modeling of expectations.
How can I create a writing process bulletin board?
Creating a bulletin board for the writing process is a great way to display the steps of the writing process in an informative way that students can refer to all year long!
Use a writing process banner and a poster for each step of the process. You can also arrange the posters for each step of the process into a clip chart layout to keep track of where students are in the writing process. It is easy to do! Simply stack the steps of the writing process posters from the first to the last step. Then, add student names to clothes pins. Have the students take ownership of their own clip and move it through the process posters as they work through the process in their writing piece.
Go one step further and create a writer's nook in your classroom! Near the writing process bulletin board display, I suggest having all the tools that writers need as they write, such as student writing notebooks, folders, pencils, erasers, sticky notes, editing and revising checklists, graphic organizers, and thesaurus books.
This is also a great corner to add helpful posters for writers, such as...
Try adding these accent pieces to make your writing corner bulletin boards pop!
How else can I support my student writers?
Don't forget that students need a lot of support to become fluent writers. Engaging students in writing tasks, writing lessons, and prompt activities is not enough support for students to understand how to write a fluent writing piece. Teaching isolated lessons on how to use a graphic organizer as a brainstorming tool is important. As you teach that lesson, refer to your bulletin board to tie together the process in action with the writing process display.
These ideas and resources will help you support your students' needs as writers...
✅collaborative stars anchor chart for peer editing and revising (FREE download)
✅ writing inventory to get to know students as writers
✅ grammar lessons and activities
✅ punctuation lessons and activities
✅ sentence structure lessons and activities
Remember to explicitly teach your students the writing process. Making the writing process accessible and understandable for upper elementary students is crucial for building confident and skilled writers.
By incorporating an interactive writing process bulletin board, explicitly teaching each step, and providing the necessary tools, you can create a supportive environment where students thrive. Remember to always refer back to your bulletin board and teach focused lessons on important writing skills and steps of the process to reinforce student understanding. With these strategies, your students will be ready to tackle any writing assignment with enthusiasm and confidence throughout the school year.
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