In this course, you will review the skills you will need to pass the Instructional Paraprofessional’s exam as you explore ways to present writing skills to students across content areas. You will also explore instructional strategies in writing skills for students at all grade levels. This course is applicable to teachers as well as instructional paraprofessionals.
Students will:
- Identify research-based best practices in writing instruction.
- Explain how to foster good spelling and phonics skills.
- Identify how to write to a specific audience and purpose.
- Explain the stages in the writing process.
- Describe techniques for enhancing syntax awareness and varying sentence structure.
- Identify ways to teach different genres of writing.
Lesson 1: Introduction to the Writing Rope
This lesson is an introduction to the framework of this text and course. In this lesson, you will learn how the skills of writing all intertwine to form the writing rope, an integral set of skills necessary for effective writing.
Lesson 2: Effective Writing Instruction
This lesson will teach you the research behind effective writing instruction. You will learn about the seven teaching principles and how to gradually increase the responsibility of the student writer.
Lesson 3: Transcription Skills
Transcription skills are the early writing skills of spelling and letter formation. In this lesson, you will learn how to teach these foundational writing skills.
Lesson 4: The Craft of Writing
Lesson Four teaches about task, audience, and purpose. You will learn how to teach these concepts so students understand the connection between these and the choices they make in writing.
Lesson 5: Stages of the Writing Process
This lesson focuses on the four steps in the writing process. It is critical that students learn and follow these steps to be successful in writing.
Lesson 6: Syntax and Sentence Skills
This lesson, about syntax and sentence skills, will cover how to teach students to compose sentences into paragraphs and longer writing passages.
Lesson 7: Text Structure
Moving on from sentence skills, this lesson teaches paragraph skills as the building blocks of longer writing; paragraph structure and parts are essential to effective writing.
Lesson 8: The Three Types of Writing
In this lesson, you will learn about the three genres of writing and how to teach the three writing types that students are required to complete.
Lesson 9: Summary Writing
Research has widely shown that the skill of writing summaries is critical to both writing and reading comprehension. In this lesson, you will learn how to teach this critical skill.
Lesson 10: Writing from Text Sources
In this lesson, you will learn instructional strategies to help students respond to narrative texts. This is a critical skill as students progress from beginning to advanced writers.
Lesson 11: Putting it All Together
This final lesson serves as a review of the techniques and strategies you’ve learned in this course. You will put it all together into a structured writing program.
