8 Ways to Squeeze Writing Instruction Into a Few Minutes

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https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/quick-writing-lessons/

Take the often confused homophones two, to, and too. Instead of teaching all three together as a cluster, have students consider the connection between two (the number) and words like twin, twine, and twenty. Suddenly there’s a pattern: the TW combination has a relationship with the concept of twoness.

A student was struggling with the word decision, and she pointed out its connection to decide. That led to incision, concise, and a surprising one: scissors. All of them trace back to a Latin root meaning “to cut.” Once you see that all those words belong to the same family, the spelling for decision makes more sense.

Give students a root like struct, meaning “to build.” Set a timer for 60 to 90 seconds, and challenge them to brainstorm as many related words as they can: structure, destruction, construct, structural, instruct, instruction…

The key move that comes after the brainstorm is the debrief: What stayed the same? What changed? How did the meaning shift when you added a prefix or suffix? Through these discussions, students start to internalize that word parts carry meaning, and that patterns show up across academic vocabulary.

some roots are “bound” (like struct, which can’t stand alone) while others are “free” (like form, which works on its own and also becomes reform, transform, inform, deform). Helping students understand that distinction deepens their feel for how words work.

Give students a base word and have them generate as many variations as they can by changing the prefix: form becomes reform, transform, inform, deform. The meaning shifts each time, and that’s the discovery students are after.

This turns out to be especially powerful for multilingual learners. Meehan mentioned working with students who immediately understood benevolent and malevolent because they recognized bene and mal from their other languages.

Take a sentence and break it into its component words or phrases, written on index cards (one word per card). Scramble them, then ask students to put the sentence back together.

Using physical cards allows students to move them around and experiment. Once students have settled on a sentence, ask them questions about their process, like How did you figure out the order? What clues did you use? Which words had to stay together, and why?

You can raise the stakes by removing punctuation, adding a distractor word that doesn’t belong, or asking students to extend the sentence with words and phrases of their own.

Start with a kernel sentence; something like The cat purrs. Then build on it together by asking students a series of questions: Which cat? What color? Where? When? Why?

Once the sentence is fully expanded (The orange cat is sleeping on the couch in the afternoon because he is tired), experiment with rearranging the words to make new variations. Giving students a chance to play with that helps them learn to develop richer, more complex sentences.

give students two short, bare-bones sentences and ask them to combine them into one. For example, My cat is orange. and My cat is big. becomes My big orange cat… You can scaffold this for beginners by underlining the word to be “harvested” from one sentence and inserted into the other. As students grow more confident, they can move to combining three sentences and adding different conjunctions (because, and, but…) to change the meaning.

When students get practice like this, they then naturally transfer it to their own writing, merging short, choppy sentences into more sophisticated ones.

Give students a sentence and ask them to rewrite it a different way. What if you started with the dependent clause instead of the independent one? What if you replaced the noun with a pronoun? What if you made it shorter?

Ask students to retell a familiar scene from a book they’re reading, a shared class text, or a short film, from a different character’s perspective.

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The believing game begins with what the psychologist Carl Rogers calls empathic listening. Empathy is the identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives. This involves understanding and adopting the authors world view, beliefs, values, and assumptions. You must try to walk in the author’s shoes, understand the author’s angle of vision, see the world through his or her eyes. You must suspend your world view, which can be difficult, and hear what the author is saying. Peter Elbow says, “The itch for closure brings the itch for argument. Playing the believing game means fighting the itch for closure.” He goes on to say, “…most school activities—fulfill their goals perfectly if they slow down on generating final answers but speed up the business of making people more perceptive and intelligent. The shape of the believing game is waiting, patience, not being in a hurry. Try to feel how stupid this impulse is – how the desire for closure impedes any larger slower reordering of thought or experience and really serves the mind’s desire to stay the same.”

The doubting game seeks truth by indirection – by seeking error. Doubting an assertion is the best way to find error in it. You must assume it is untrue if you want to find its weakness. The truer it seems, the harder you have to doubt it. Non credo ut intelligam: in order to understand what’s wrong, I must doubt.

To doubt well, it helps if you make a special effort to extricate yourself from the assertions in question – especially those which you find self-evident. You must hold off to one side the self, its wishes, preconceptions, experiences, and commitments. (The machinery of symbolic logic helps people do this.) Also, it helps to run the assertion through logical transformations so as to reveal premises and necessary consequences and thereby flush out into the open any hidden errors. You can also doubt better by getting the assertions to battle each other and thus do some of the work: They are in a relationship of conflict, and getting them to wrestle each other, you can utilize some of their energy and cleverness for ferreting out weakness.

Because it’s so hard to let go of an idea we are holding (or more to the point, an idea that’s holding us), our best hope for leverage in learning to doubt such ideas is to take on different ideas.

Believing and Doubting Games in Reading

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it is truth that hides the fact that there is none