How Text-Based Writing Instruction Can Help Your Students Transfer Their Grammar Skills To Their Writing

Text-Based Writing Instruction Doesn't Have To Be Difficult.

Picture this. You've realized that your students struggle with a grammar concept. Maybe their writing is riddled with run-on sentences. Or perhaps they rely too heavily on simple sentence structures. Or maybe they struggle with fragments. You teach a grammar lesson on the topic, hoping to solve the problem. The grammar lesson goes smoothly, and the students really seem to grasp the concept. Yet, their writing doesn't improve. They can fix the problem on a grammar worksheet, but they still make the same errors in their writing assignments. Does this sound familiar?

If the answer to that question is yes, then your students might have trouble transferring their grammar skills to their writing. They view grammar lessons and writing assignments as two separate entities, and they need to be explicitly taught how to use their grammar skills in their academic writing.

The solution to this is text-based writing instruction. If you intentionally tie every grammar lesson into a text-based writing assignment, it will help students to strengthen their writing skills. In fact, they will start to view grammar lessons as writing lessons. Here's how it works.

STEP 1: Teach A Mini Grammar Lesson On The Writing Skill

Before asking students to do any writing, I make sure to teach the pertinent grammar lessons. For example, if I am asking students to identify fragments and turn them into complete sentences, I will teach a mini lesson on fragments and sentences. If I want students to add appositives to their sentences, I will teach a mini lesson on appositives to make sure that the students know what an appositive is. 

You can create your own grammar lessons, or you can use pre-made lessons. If you are looking for pre-made slides with grammar lessons, practice, and answer keys, check out this resource in my store. All of the work is done for you!

STEP 2: Practice The Skill Together

Once the students understand the grammar behind the writing skill, it is time to practice writing together. For this step, I will use general examples and sentences that are not tied to any texts. Text-based writing will come later, but this is a chance to practice the skill before doing any reading. For example, I might give the student a short list of fragments and ask them to help me turn the fragments into complete sentences. Or I might give them a few sentences with appositives, and ask them to identify the appositives with me. 

The purpose of this step is to make sure that the students understand the writing skill. This is a chance for you to see if there are any misunderstandings that need to be cleared up before moving on to the third step.

STEP 3: Read A High Interest Text Together

Now it is time to apply the writing skills to a text. I try to choose high interest texts like fairy tales or short stories. If you are reading a novel together in your homeschool classroom, this might be a great time to read a chapter out loud. During this step, stop periodically to check for understanding. The better your students understand the text, the easier it will be for them to write about it.

You could skip this step and just ask the students to write about a passage that they have read in the past, but I like to take the time to read a passage together. This ensures that the text is fresh in their minds, and it prevents the students from struggling to remember something that they may have read weeks ago. 

STEP 4: Independent Practice

Once the students have read a passage, it is time to ask them to write about it. I have them work on a handout based on the skill that we covered in the mini grammar lesson. If we are working on appositives, I might give them a worksheet that asks them to add appositives to sentences about characters from the story that we just read. Or if we are working on fragments and sentences, I might give them a worksheet that contains a paragraph about the story. They will have to identify the fragments in the paragraph and turn them into complete sentences using details from the story.

This gets the students into the habit of applying the writing skills to their academic writing. By immediately giving students the opportunity to use the skill when writing about a text, I am encouraging them to use the skills in all of their academic and text-based writing.

You can create your own worksheets, or you can use pre-made worksheets. I have several pre-made sentence writing worksheets in my store. You can check them out here. 

STEP 5: Review

Once you have taught a new writing skill to your students, make sure to take the time to review. This could be as simple as assigning a chapter of reading and a corresponding text-based writing worksheet for homework.  Depending on your students, you might also want to reteach the mini lesson in a few weeks and go through the entire process again just to make sure that your students are really comfortable with the strategy. 

Final Thoughts

While there are many different ways to implement text-based writing in your classroom, I have found that these steps help to provide a structured approach to writing.

If you are looking for slideshows and mini lessons to help you introduce new grammar concepts in your classroom, check out my store for resources. 

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