Writing assignments are often new to young students. Children do not automatically understand the purpose or structure of a book report, journal entry, letter or even short story. Educators need to explain the aim of a particular type of writing as well as its appearance. Providing a sample model of writing clarifies the expectations of an assignment for young students.
Prompting students encourages them to take an interest in a writing assignment. Prompts may consist of a question, such as, "If you had a million dollars, what would you do with it?" Or they may be an evocative picture, a story or poem or a statement students can either agree or disagree with. Coming up with topics on their own is challenging for children; a prompt provides one for them.
Even though high school and college students use brainstorming to generate ideas for papers, brainstorming is a simple enough activity for children to perform. Brainstorming can involve generating a list of rough ideas based on a writing prompt, or drawing a mind map, which organizes related and supporting ideas around a central topic written in the center of a piece of paper. A young student's mind map might begin with the topic "family" and branch out into "parents," "siblings," "loving" and "home."
Once students have brainstormed some ideas, the next step entails organizing them into some sort of order. For example, a book report begins with the publication information, such as title, author and date of publication, followed by a brief plot summary and then an analysis or personal review of the book. Stories include an introduction, rising action, climax and denouement. A poem that tells a story, such as a limerick, also follows the traditional plot structure, whereas free verse poems, by nature being more flexible in terms of structure, allow students to order ideas as they see fit. Students can number the main topic "1" and then decide which points to include next, numbering as they go along. Alternatively, teachers can simplify this stage of the pre-writing process by providing students with templates they simply fill in. For example, a short story template would include a section to describe the conflict, rising action and so on.