Improving Student Writing Skills - cse crafts

Improving Student Writing Skills
• Choose not to use the sheets and support
struggling students with individual or small group
lessons.
Bubbling
Many authors refer to this technique as a mind web.
Writing their topic in the center of the page, students
will circle it and connect related ideas like cartoon
quote bubbles. Students may turn in a sheet similar to
the example on page 47 with their finished assignment
packet or something more simple, like the template on
page 48, depending on how many details they include.
From the central topic, the ideas connected directly to it
may represent paragraphs in a draft, and the bubbles connected
to these will likely become ideas that support the
paragraph. By working toward higher levels of specificity
as the bubbles extend from the center, students will create
a logical path of thought and will have premade topic
sentences supported with details.
Notice also that ideas can be interconnected. Using
arrows, students can link two far-apart ideas. Perhaps in
their draft, one of these ideas will be the last sentence
of a paragraph, and the idea connected by an arrow will
form the first sentence of the next, creating a logical flow
between paragraphs.
Also, if a peripheral idea elicits a storm of connected
thoughts, students may start a new prewriting sheet
with this idea as their central bubble. For example, “jealous
‘cause I couldn’t catch anything” threatened to spin
out of control in the example on page 47. Perhaps this
could be a topic of its own on a new prewrite page.
If students get stuck, encourage them to dive into adjectives
to explain one of their ideas more fully. For example,
“grouper” could be connected to “spotted,” “short-
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