Janessa Bechard

Independent Study- Writing Strategies

I have been doing a book study on the book, The Writing Strategies Book by Jennifer Serravallo.
I chose this book because as a staff of Sherman Elementary School, we did a book on Jennifer
Serravallo’s book The Reading Strategies Book and I found it to be an amazing resource. This
writing strategies book explores many different strategies to help support emergent writers all the
way through skilled writers. The book is extremely easy to navigate and is broken up into ten
different goals: Composing with Pictures; Engagement: Independence, Increasing Volume, and
Developing a Writing Identity; Generating and Collecting Ideas; Focus/Meaning; Organization
and Structure; Elaboration; Word Choice; Conventions: Spelling and Letter Formation;
Conventions: Grammar and Punctuation; and Collaborating with Writing Partners and Clubs.
Some of these topics are more relevant to emerging writers than others but I still like that there is
information for skilled writers; this helps me picture where ideally my writers will eventually be
in future grades.

As a school, we have been working on adding to our demonstration (conferring) notebooks. A

demonstration notebook is used during a conference during writer’s workshop. In my classroom,
we have forty-five minutes of writers workshop each day. This is where students are given a
mini-lesson and then are sent to work independently on their writing. During this time, I am able
to confer with students on what they are working on. This model can be challenging but I’m
appreciating the tool that I have developed to help conferences go smoothly.

In this paper, I will highlight the strategies that I have taken from Jennifer Serravallo’s book, The
Writing Strategies Book and have implemented into my demonstration notebook. In Jennifer
Serravallo’s book, each strategy has different main that are presented on each page.
 Here is a copy of the strategy page “Observe Closely”.

The “Strategy” portion of

the page tells the reader a
little bit more about the
strategy.
The teaching tip is just
a reminder on how to
teach this strategy, it’s
the part that explains
Who is this for? This the process.
explains which grade
level would most
likely benefit from the
strategy, what genre
fits with this strategy
and what part of the
writing process this is
most relevant for.

The “prompts” is
probably my favorite
part of the entire
page. I love that
Jennifer Serravallo
included prompts that
you can use to help
stimulate
conversation and
discussion.

The “Hat Tip” portion is

on most of the pages.
This is just a resource
that is recommended if
A visual is included on
the student continues to
every page to show the
struggle with this
strategy “in action”
strategy.
Often times when I am working with a writer, they forget what they are writing. They rely on me to help
them decode what they have written. In kindergarten, we really teach the foundational skills of Writer’s
Workshop. We want students to be independent writers and continue to work even when the teacher
isn’t right next to them. I took the visual from Jennifer Serravallo’s book and put it into my
demonstration notebook. I believe that this visual helps students remember to write, reread, write,
reread, and repeat. I especially liked the prompts that Serravallo included for this strategy. I wrote them
around the anchor chart, to help remind me to use those prompts while I’m conferring. On the next
page, I included an area where I can practice this strategy with a student. I envision the student having a
dry erase marker. I would prompt the student with a sentence, they would write the first word, then
reread, write the second word, then reread, and so on until the entire sentence would be written on out
on the “story page”.
I was excited when I found the “Organize in Sequence” strategy in Serravallo’s book. When writing true
narrative stories or how-to informative books, students forget to put their story in order. Their order
gets jumbled up because they will remember something that happened and they will just write it at the
end of the story. I used Jennifer’s visual for this strategy. I loved the story-telling language that she uses
throughout the chart. In kindergarten, we focus on writing three connected events but I can see the five
step process enriching for the stronger writers in my class. I wrote down the prompts that Serravallo
included for this strategy as I believe it’s important to use consistent language. To practice, I put
together a page where I envision the student telling me three events in their story and I would quickly
draw or write their ideas on each of the three sticky notes. Then the child would need to sort them in
sequence. I would then leave those three stick notes with the child to help organize their writing.
In the beginning stages of writing, children will write the beginning sound and then the ending sound.
Often times, beginning writers forget to listen to the middle of their word. To help establish an
understanding of middle sounds, I took Jennifer Serravallo’s strategy of “Long or Short” and put it into
my demonstration notebook. The prompts that were on this strategy page are important to utilize to
use a common language for all students. To practice, I would say words that are longer and then words
that are shorter. Then the student would be able to point to the “Long” box or the “short” box. This
exercise would help establish an awareness of word length and medial sounds.
In our writing lessons, we talk about adding details into our writing. Sometimes students don’t
understand exactly what details they could add to their story. I believe that Serravallo’s strategy
“Observe Closely” will help students recognize what details they need to add (what they saw, heard,
smelled, felt, tasted, were reminded of, and felt emotionally). The visual for this strategy has very basic
pictures to help the kindergartners understand the picture. I have included the writing prompts to help
remind myself what to say and discuss with the children. To practice this skill, I put two pictures on the
page. I want students to tell me details that they could add if they were writing about these topics. We
would use the anchor chart to help go through all of the details that we could add.
In kindergarten, we teach -ing as a unit. Often times, children just put a “g” at the end of the word to
make it have an -ing ending. I added the -ing anchor chart to help show the ending. To practice this skill,
I plan on having the children turn the words, “walk, sing, eat, and rain” into “walking, “singing, eating,
raining”. This practice will help students remember the -ing ending. I also will leave the with miniature
ing charts to remind them of the strategy.
Teaching vowels is something that we focus on towards the middle of the school year but work on
inexplicitly throughout the entire school year. There are some writers who are ready for this part of
their writing whereas some students have mastered or are not ready for this step. I have included a
vowel chart that we use throughout the school year in my demonstration notebook; and then also left a
space for the children to practice stretching out the words that need vowels to be added.
In the beginning stages of writing, students forget to put spaces in between each word. After teaching
about spaces, students sometimes over generalize and want to put a space in between each letter. This
is an ongoing lesson. I use many different strategies to show how to insert spaces. I added this strategy
to the demonstration notebook to help show where spaces need to go. I have included a moveable hand
to help students see the difference between the words and to help them establish where the spaces
need to go.
I find this strategy to be extremely helpful. This is a strategy that I have implemented a few times but
once I saw this strategy again in Jennifer Serravallo’s book, I decided that I wanted to give it another try.
This strategy helps plan the page, make spaces in between words, and helps students remember what
they were going to write. By having the student say the words they want to write, count the words, and
then put lines down on their paper, helps them in many ways. To practice this strategy, I anticipate
saying a sentence, having the student count the words in the sentence and then writing the lines down
on the “practice page” to remind them of the process of planning ahead. This has shown to be an
effective strategy and I look forward to using this more in the future.

Making a demsontration notebook has shown to be very time consuming. Fortunately, this is something
that is very supported at our school. I cannot wait to continue to use Jennifer Serravallo’s book The
Writing Strategies Book to help facilitate conferences with my emergent writers. This is an ongoing
project and I look forward to using this resource over and over throughout my years of teaching.