THE ACADEMIC CORNER
Students will benefit from writing instruction

Last week, teachers from Washington Wilkes Elementary School joined with teachers at Washington-Wilkes Primary School for an in-service day workshop on writing instruction. The session was presented by Shirley Poulton, author of Teach the Traits of Effective Writing. Poulton,

30 year veteran of the elementary classroom, employs the six traits of effective writing in her presentations as she trains teachers to identify what strategies to teach and then how to implement these strategies into daily classroom instruction. This joint venture between the two faculties promotes vertical teaming from one grade level to the next and insures a consistent and pervasive approach to the writing process from kindergarten through fifth grade.

The Reading/Language Arts teachers at WWPS and WWES were already familiar with Power Writing - an instructional technique that uses graphic organizers to teach students how to organize their writing. After students are comfortable with writing simple stories, some of them just a few sentences in length, they are taught to enhance their writing with supporting sentences, descriptive words and opening and closing paragraphs. This process required a great deal of modeling in the classroom, with many early stories written together in large and small groups under careful teacher guidance.

Reading/Language Arts teachers at WWES were also familiar with the "six traits of writing" that Poulton discussed in her presentation. WWES teachers took part in a year long professional learning course on the Six Traits of Writing over this past school year. The six traits are: sen- tence fluency, precise word choice/ rich vocabulary, organization, ideas and content, voice, and conventions (includes grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling). These traits, when combined with Power Writing strategies, provide a strong and reliable model for success when teaching the writing process and for producing high quality student writing.

Wilkes County educators strive to make writing a part of their daily instruction across all curriculum areas. Georgia's performance-based writing assessments are administered to students in grades three, five, eight, and eleven. Student writing samples are evaluated on an analytic scoring system in all grades to provide diagnostic feedback to teachers, students, and parents about individual performance.

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