The first day of fall is just around the corner! It’s Back-to-School season. Likely your students are close to completing their first CORE journal of the year. Now’s the time to offer a lovely bouquet of red pens.

“What’s your big idea?”

The purpose of writing is to communicate an idea. In order to accomplish this goal, students need to develop the skills and confidence that will prepare them to communicate that idea well.

Teach your students early on to read what they write.

Take this a step further. Hand them a red pen!

Before conferencing with your students, encourage them to read their first draft and to indicate mistakes they catch with red marks. Encourage them to look for misspelling, capitalization, and grammatical errors. They might not catch everything, but you’ll certainly be surprised what they will catch. Once they are confident, challenge them to consider word choice, to rearrange phrasing, to strike through redundancy, and to avoid what we writers call waffle!

All writing comes into being through a process:

1. First comes the IDEA. Without an idea, the writer will simply stare at the blank page.

2. Once there is an idea in the mind of the writer, the pencil steps in to translate the idea to words on the page.

3. When the pencil’s work is complete, the job of the writer is to become a reader. Encourage your students to READ everything they write—absolutely everything! It is often best to leave space between the “draft” and the “read” stage.

4. Next, make sure students use the RED pen as they read through the first draft of their idea. Teach them to look for spelling errors, for capitalization errors, and for grammatical errors. Beyond this teach them to use strong words, to fearlessly re-arrange, and to not be afraid to strike through unnecessary words.

5. Lastly, teach them to polish the draft, preferably in cursive.

There is NO substitute for consistently encouraging your children to write their ideas. No matter the level, kindergarten through high school, make sure your students are equipped with a pencil and a red pen. We urge you to courageously coach your students in the process of writing! Teaching your students to engage in the process of constructing ideas—to read what they write and use their very own red pen—will certainly teach them more about writing than hours and hours of deconstructive writing tasks.

Come June, your students will have not only brought shape to significant original ideas, but also learned to enter into the work that makes those ideas shine. More importantly, they will have gained confidence in their ability to communicate. Writing an idea is genius.

~Kimberly