Activities and Techniques to Improve Writing Skills for Students

As a teacher, you’re always looking for ways to improve writing skills for students. With so many essential skills tied to writing proficiency, it’s important to include lessons, activities and strategies to help your class improve their writing skills. These skills are an essential part of communicating in every grade and at every age. 

Regardless of whether you are teaching first or fifth grade, your students will benefit from having daily writing opportunities in your classroom. Continue reading below to discover effective strategies and tips on how to improve student writing.

Techniques to Build Student Writing Confidence

Many students can feel overwhelmed when it comes to writing. They may be unsure of what to include, worry about meeting the requirements or struggle to express their thoughts clearly. This lack of confidence can be addressed through specific techniques and activities.

It is important to create plenty of opportunities for both creative writing and writing about their personal interests, which is a great way to help students gain confidence and improve their skills. When students enjoy what they’re writing about, they become more engaged and motivated. The confidence and skills gained through these activities can transfer to more structured writing tasks as your students progress.

Daily Activities to Build Writing Confidence 

One way to improve writing skills for students and build confidence is to incorporate simple writing exercises into their daily routine. 

Daily writing activities are effective writing exercises for students that make writing feel less intimidating as the school year progresses. Daily assignments, such as journal entries or writing challenges, can be woven into other subject areas, providing opportunities for students to grow more comfortable with their writing.

Daily Journal Prompt to Inspire Thoughtful Writing

Having your class write in a journal is great daily writing practice for student improvement. You may encourage older students to write a paragraph about whatever they want, while younger students may need a prompt. Some prompts can include:

• Yesterday, I felt…
• Today, I feel…
• Yesterday was a good day because…
• Today, after school, I’m going to…
• Last weekend I…
• This weekend I’m going to…
• Something I really don’t like to do is…
• Something I really like to do is…   
• If I could have any animal, it would be a…

Prompts like these give students a direction for their thoughts but still allow plenty of room for creativity. You can decide if you’d like to check their journals for punctuation and spelling or if you’d like to use them only as a way to encourage student writing. Click here for additional journal prompt ideas. 

Quick Write Challenges

Provide students with a specific topic, picture or sentence starter and give them a short, focused time limit (five minutes) to write as much as they can. For example, ask them to describe a setting in vivid detail, craft an opening for a story or write a conversation between two characters. 

Short bursts of creativity encourage idea generation, vocabulary development and practice in structuring sentences or ideas without the pressure of a lengthy assignment.

Engaging Activities to Improve Writing Skills 

Spark Creativity with a Visual Writing Prompt

Visuals are an effective and unique way to create engaging writing prompts for students. Try swapping your normal word prompts for visual prompts. For younger students, it is best to choose action-based visuals. For example, a girl jumping rope or swimming in a pool. Provide sentence starters that align with the image to help your students begin, i.e., an image of a girl swimming, “The girl is_________.” Have your students come up with the rest of the sentence. Discuss as a class and explore different responses to the prompt to foster creativity.

Older students can describe what the girl is doing in more detail and write a story about it. Encourage them to use their imagination to create a creative writing piece about why the girl is at the pool and what she will do while she’s there.

Celebrate Your Star of the Week

If your class selects a student each week to be the star of the week, this is a great chance to incorporate a writing activity. Sometime during the week, have your students write a letter to the star of the week explaining what they like about that person, why they think that person is an amazing star or sharing a memory about something the two of them did together during the school year.

Younger students can be given sentence starters such as:

• You are a star because…
• Something I like about you is…
• I remember when we…

Older students should be encouraged to write their own letters in proper letter format. This not only teaches good writing skills but proper letter (or email) writing etiquette.  

Combine Art and Writing with Comic Strips

Comic strip writing allows students to express themselves using both writing and visuals. Have your students create a short story, either real or imagined and use each comic square to tell it. Older students should be able to complete this activity on their own, while younger students may need help with spelling. You can also tie this activity to another class assignment, like summarizing a book you’ve been reading in class. Provide prompts if needed to guide their storytelling. Turn those comic strip pages into a lasting keepsake by publishing them in a classbook.

Measuring Success: How to Track Writing Skill Progress 

There are a variety of ways you can measure student progress throughout the year, including:

Use of word wall/vocabulary words - As the school year progresses, you should see your students using more words from the word wall or vocabulary list. You can also challenge them to use multiple vocabulary words within their writing to see where their skills lie.

Sentence length and quantity - Sentence length and quantity should progress throughout the school year. If students start by writing one simple sentence at the beginning of the year, two or more detailed sentences could be expected by mid-year.

Student confidence - The use of daily writing exercises should help even your most reluctant writers become more comfortable with the activity. Watch for signs of growth, such as fewer complaints, increased enthusiasm or quicker completion of writing tasks.

Reviewing the year’s achievements - To see your students’ growth, review their work from the beginning of the school year to the end. Compare their progress in vocabulary use, penmanship and the complexity of their sentences or paragraphs.  

Lesson Plans to Improve Writing Skills

Get students engaged in your lessons by involving them every step of the way. Encourage creativity, collaboration and critical thinking with interactive lessons designed to help your students develop stronger writing skills.

Informational Animal Report

Assign each student an animal to write a report on. Once they know their animal, gather the class together to explain what informational writing is and that for the lesson, they will need to write facts about their animal. Brainstorm topics together, such as where the animal lives, what it eats and if it has any natural predators.

Write these ideas on the board for all to see so that students can reference them as they work. You can provide prompts to help younger students get started. Check students’ work as they go to ensure they understand the statements in their report need to be true versus imaginary. 

Book Report

Select a grade-appropriate book to read together as a class. Explain to your students that they will complete a book report after reading it. Here are some unique book report ideas for 3rd grade that can be adapted for higher or lower grade levels. Describe what type of book report students will be doing and what information they should include in their report. Ensure students can reference the requirements of the book report throughout the assignment.

As you read, pause to discuss events and characters, highlighting what students might include in their reports. After finishing the book, review the main events and guide students in outlining their reports, providing prompts for younger students as needed.

Create and Publish a Classbook 

As educators, finding effective strategies to enhance student writing is key to nurturing their growth and creativity. With the right tools, you can inspire your students and perhaps even help shape the next generation of best-selling authors. Through engaging classroom strategies and creative writing activities, you can make writing an enjoyable and impactful part of their educational journey. 

With Studentreasures’ FREE classbook publishing kit, you can transform classroom writing activities into a published masterpiece. Whether your students are creating stories, comic books or journal entries, they can contribute their unique voices to a collaborative classbook that they will be proud to share with their friends and families. A classbook is more than just a book; it can help foster a passion for writing and learning that will last a lifetime. By participating in the project, students gain confidence when they see their words come to life in print, inspiring them to view themselves as real authors.