Make Your Writing Colorful

Writing instruction can be incredibly frustrating for teachers of English language learners, because many of the activities in our teaching toolbox offer little benefit to our students who are struggling. This month I am going to focus on different strategies and techniques I found helpful in my own practice to help struggling writers.

First up…Make Your Writing Colorful

The materials needed are four highlighters (yellow, blue, pink, green) or 4 color pencils, per student or student group

The prep time is minimal

This is something adapted from Gretchen Bernabei; I highly recommend her books or if you ever have the opportunity attending her workshops. I attended several in Houston and always walked away with new ideas.

It all started with her Ba-Da-Bing sentences:

Where my feet went?   As I walked into the classroom,

What I saw?   I saw the students climbing on the desks,                                       

What I thought?   and I thought, "they have lost their minds!"

What a great and simple way to get my students to think about complex sentence structure without teaching them complex sentence structure.

My students could write them, but in their papers, I was not seeing a lot of evidence of them. And by high school we need more variety in our sentences. I could see my students were using a lot of one kind of writing but my students could not.

As a revision strategy: After my students would write I would have them highlight their writing according to this poster.

After a while, I realized the need for green to be used for action as well. This simple strategy made it very clear what students preferred writing. Some would nearly have all one color. Very few were skilled enough to incorporate all of them.

My students could then revise their writing pieces how they needed. To experiment, I gave my students index cards with visuals for the five senses, a foot, a thought bubble, a heart, and a speech bubble – all color coded – to manipulate and explore different sentence varieties.

After a while, every year the same general conversation ensues:

Student: “But Ms. E, do we need to have three colors in each sentence?”

Me: “No”

Students: “Then why have we been doing this?”

Me: “Writers use a variety of sentences to create different effects”

Students: “like what?”

So the whole class, interest peaked by this student’s challenge, makes a student’s independent reading colorful.

Students: “That’s a lot of yellow”

Me: “What does that mean?”

This discussion could go on and on, but it allows for deeper conversations about things like point-of-view, voice, and it helps students read like writers. We begin collecting “gems” or colorful sentences from student writings and mentor texts.

With my secondary English language learners, I could always tell their frustration with having complex ideas and thoughts but lacking the language to communicate them. This allows them to combine simple sentence structures to create a variety of more complex structures. As they look for these “gems,” they are seeing how to create a variety of sentences.

Additional Resources:

Gretchen Bernabei’s website: 

http://www.trailofbreadcrumbs.net/