The age-old advice to “write what you know” is as appropriate for children as it is for adults. Provide your students with a range of familiar prompts to select from. When they choose from well-known categories like family, food, animals, plants or toys, you know your students are not struggling for mastery of information at the same time they work through organizing and presenting their ideas on paper.
Once children have selected their prompts, provide them with ample background information via informational texts and websites. Give your students time to interact with the information through independent reading, reading aloud and guided reading. When they are ready to write, bring focus to their topic with word webs. By starting with a picture of their prompt in the center of the page and surrounding it with a web of descriptive words or pictures, you enrich their language as well as help them organize information focused on a specific topic.
Before putting sentences on paper, the ReadWriteThink website of the National Council of Teachers of English suggests students first create a detailed illustration of their topic. Provide them with ruled paper with a section at the top for drawing a picture. Drawing allows students to further explore their ideas before committing to writing. Build in time for sharing their work, accompanied by questions and comments from classmates. This helps the writer clarify her purpose and allows for a mini-celebration of her work.
If this is your students’ first experience with drawing and writing prompts, NCTE recommends modeling how to integrate the details from their illustration into sentences. Invite students to join you in a thorough examination of a drawing you made of a topic. Look for specific details and capture them in short sentences. Engage students with questions about how they might start their own writing. Keep your examples within the bounds of your expectations for them as young writers; provide them with attainable examples.
You have a wide array of possible responses to students’ writing. Choices include conferencing with them to encourage reflection and revision, using their writing as an assessment tool, or “publishing” their pieces by mounting and displaying them in the school. The Old Town, Maine school district used district performance standards to create a writing assessment rubric for their drawing and writing prompts. Some of their measurements called for students to use at least two sentences to describe their pictures, to form words rather than using random strings of letters and to use some language conventions and descriptive words.