How to give explicit writing instruction in the primary grades – with Sally Bergquist

��TRT Podcast #167: How to give explicit writing instruction in the primary grades – with Sally Bergquiest

Sally Bergquist is an experienced teacher who has written an explicit, structured writing program for K-2. Listen to learn her tips for getting kids started in kindergarten, gradually building their writing skills throughout the primary grades, and finding the right balance between explicit instruction and practice with feedback.����

Listen to the episode here��

Full episode transcript




Transcript




Email



Download



New Tab

Hello! This is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom. In today's episode, I spoke with Sally Bergquist, an experienced teacher who has written a writing program for K-2 called Growing Writers. I know that understanding more about how to explicitly teach writing in the primary grades is a question many of us have. I get this question in emails quite a bit, "How can I get my students started as writers and then teach them writing explicitly?" We go through all of that in this episode. I know you're going to really enjoy it.

I also recommend that you check out Sally's website, Growing Writers. In the show notes I've linked to her website, her programs, as well as the research base that she has followed to create her program. A very special thing about her program is that she's developed it over many years as a teacher. She kept refining it and testing it with other classrooms. It's not just a quick thing that she put together; it is well vetted and well tested. I would encourage you to look at that if you're looking for an explicit writing program for the primary grades. Let's get started!

Anna Geiger: Welcome Sally!

Sally Bergquist: Hi! Great to be here!

Anna Geiger: I'm so glad you're here. We've talked over the years and finally found a time to really sit down and tease out all the complexities of teaching writing in the primary grades, particularly in kindergarten.

Can you talk to us about your teaching experience and what you're doing now?

Sally Bergquist: I had a lot of different experiences in my twenties and thirties, starting with work in infant and toddler daycare. I worked for Head Start, I did substitute teaching, I worked in a little alternative school, and then I ran my own preschool when my daughter was that age so I could stay home. Then in my late thirties, I thought I better get a teaching job that pays a little more and has some health insurance and retirement benefits. My daughter was starting first grade, so I got a teaching job and I stayed at that school for 24 years teaching kindergarten, first, and second grade.

In my first couple years of teaching, I saw things that I was doing that were not effective in writing instruction. I saw where kids were getting frustrated and I was getting frustrated, and I thought there has to be a better way to do this. There has to be a gradual way to teach writing where everyone succeeds.

So I started developing writing lessons and working out skills and sequences, basically starting out with how to teach handwriting. What works? Over the years I had many trial and error experiences as I went up through eleven years in kindergarten, seven years in first grade, and then six years in second grade. I kept adding on more skills and working out this sequence of what works, what's the right speed, what to introduce.

Now what I'm doing is I'm trying to spread the word about the importance of writing, and I'm also working on a book on how to teach writing in K-2.

Anna Geiger: Oh, that's wonderful! That is a very needed book, so you'll have to keep me posted on that.

Sally Bergquist: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: When we think about teaching writing and learning about teaching writing, that is just very hard. I know most of what we read out there is for kids who are already past writing a sentence or able to write a sentence, and there isn't a lot out there for kindergarten teachers and first grade teachers who are trying to figure out where to get started from the ground up.

There's also not as much research as we'd like to see. There's tons and tons of research for teaching reading to the littles, but when it comes to teaching writing, there's not a lot of research there. Why do you think that is?

Sally Bergquist: This is a really big reason I think, there's no urgency about it since writing isn't tested. Since 2002 and No Child Left Behind, one of the big mandates of No Child Left Behind is that reading and math will be tested every year. It's high stakes; schools get punished if they're not on track. I think there was a fair amount of writing going on in classrooms in the '80s and '90s. I don't know what years you were teaching.

Anna Geiger: Early 2000s.

Sally Bergquist: Yeah, there was a lot more emphasis on writing and time for it. As soon as No Child Left Behind came in, at least in my school and my state, all of a sudden writing was ignored. In the educational world in America, we base what's important on what's tested, so if something's not tested, it just goes away, and also there's no time allotted for it. Your district isn't going to say you have to spend this much time on writing because there's no incentive to do that; no one's going to care. You're not going to get marked down because your kids can't write. I think the research has followed that tendency.

Anna Geiger: So maybe the research is following the interest? It's following what people are really interested in learning about and that may not be-

Sally Bergquist: Yes! Yes, and the interests are often based on going back to what's tested, what's mandated.

Anna Geiger: Exactly.

Why is it so important to get writing instruction right from the beginning? Why do we need to take it seriously even in kindergarten?

Sally Bergquist: Well, I think we have to start with why is it important to be a writer to begin with? Why be a writer at all? Obviously we know the advantage of being able to read, that's really, really clear and obvious, but I think there are hidden advantages to being able to write. Writing and reading both by third grade, if you're not on track, the same thing happens in both of those skills. It's just that writing is more hidden and in the background, but kids are failing in writing right and left.

Anna Geiger: You said something that made me think that I hadn't really thought about before. What's interesting is that at the beginning, in early school, writing is a hidden skill if you're not being asked to do it very often. It may be that teachers may not know how well students can form a sentence or write a paragraph, but then when you're an adult and you're in the workplace, your boss may never hear you read, but they're definitely going to see the writing that you do, so now all of a sudden, it's very obvious.

Sally Bergquist: Exactly.

Anna Geiger: We also would all probably agree that we tend to judge someone's intelligence by their writing. If someone would communicate through work and not use complete sentences or use fragments or use poor spelling, that reflects on them for better or for worse. That's a really big reason to get it right, and we can't wait until the middle grades to suddenly teach writing; we've got to get started from the beginning.

Sally Bergquist: Yes.

Anna Geiger: Thinking about writing, I think when I was a classroom teacher, I taught third, fourth, and fifth grade first, and then first and second, and I did use Writing Workshop in all of them. That was what I had learned.

I think there are some things to be said for Writing Workshop, I definitely don't want to communicate that it's all bad or anything like that, but at least in the way that I was carrying it out, there wasn't a lot of explicit instruction. There was a lot of, you just need lots of time to do this. Let me just give you the time to figure this out, basically.

It was also a lot of assuming on my part - assuming that they knew how to form a sentence, assuming that they knew how to plan a story, or that they would just figure it out as they went along, versus really thinking about what are the foundational skills they need to get started.

I have so many regrets, so many regrets, but one would be just getting frustrated that a child just wasn't getting started, they just weren't doing it. I was like, why are you ... To me I looked at it as almost as a defiance issue, which shows how little I knew. I just didn't know the breakdown of all the skills that he really had to be able to do to get started. I couldn't see inside of his head. I knew that he could form letters and he could do some basic spelling, so I assumed he had what he needed.

You have created a writing pyramid to clarify all the skills that are involved in writing as well as to show what you believe should be taught as children progress. Can you talk us through why you developed that and a little bit about it?

Sally Bergquist: Yeah. Well, one of the things I learned as I went was how much needed to be broken down. I would try and do something with the class, and my barometer was always, how are the most struggling kids doing? I wasn't willing to leave anyone behind. I would come up with this lesson that I thought was just wonderful and I thought was small enough for everyone to get, and I would introduce it, and then I'd have hands in the air and kids stuck and it was like, wow, even that wasn't enough. I need to break this down even more.

The very, very first level is just simply things like staying seated and knowing how to work quietly. In kindergarten, you can't get started with writing until the kids have those skills because otherwise they're up, they're coming to see you, they're talking to their friend. We go through things like a pencil is a tool, not a toy.

Anna Geiger: Not a weapon!

Sally Bergquist: Not a weapon. Don't play fight with it!

We do simple drawing. I found that kids' fine motor skills really improved when I would teach how to draw really simple things, just shapes and things, even before starting handwriting.

I was all the time thinking about how are they going to be ready for the next step? What do they need to master to really be ready?

Even in first grade, I didn't give kids their writing workbooks until they could demonstrate that they could work silently for five minutes because otherwise I'm wasting time.

The first level is things like pencil grip, drawing, and the handwriting for sure, and even breaking handwriting down into round letters and tall letters.

The next level would be really getting more fluency now that they know how to write all their letters and they're hopefully going along with reading. They're learning about letter sounds so they can use that because writing and reading go hand in hand.

Then sentences come later, sentences and punctuation. I'm hoping that that will be helpful to some people and other people will look at it and see if it makes sense. Here again, it's one more thing that needs researching.

Anna Geiger: So if someone's a kindergarten teacher and they're starting out the year... Let's say they want to have their students maybe draw pictures and maybe, if they're able to, use some letters to label a picture, so the sun might be SN or something depending on what level of development they're at. What would you recommend for the teacher? I'm getting the impression you would not say to dive into that right away, so how do you get yourself to that?

Sally Bergquist: For the first maybe month or so before handwriting, just doing really simple shapes, simple drawing, tracing lines, doing a lot of hand and finger things such as Play-Doh. Some kids haven't done that at home. It's getting their fine motor muscles in their fingers going.

Anna Geiger: Basically you're saying to take some time, do some fine motor muscle type activities, and then build into handwriting.

Tell me how your program works. When do kindergartners start to actually draw their own picture and maybe label it?

Sally Bergquist: Drawing starts right away for sure, but labeling is a difficult skill. I think if I was to ask kids to label, I would be very clear about what that meant. Does that mean just the first letter of a word? How much are you expecting?

I would base success on where I thought that they were. I wouldn't ask for more than I thought they could do, so I wouldn't do it until I knew that enough of them would be successful at coming up with at least that first letter in a word. Then I would say just get the first letter of the word, so they're really clear about what it means. I'm not expecting more than that right away.

Anna Geiger: So at the beginning of the year, you're focusing on the fine motor, the drawing, the handwriting. Then you go into the writing, knowing that some students may be at that point where they can label the pictures, but you're not teaching this exactly or expecting it until you feel that more students can be successful. Is that what you're saying?

Sally Bergquist: Right, and the key word is expect. Kids can be labeling all they want if they want to label and they know how to label, great. But I wouldn't expect everyone to until a certain point, and then I would say, "I know that all of you have learned enough letters and sounds, you're ready to go, and today we're going to do something new and I want you to write a letter that the word starts with next to three things in your picture." I'm being really specific.

Anna Geiger: If you had to break down the lessons in your program in terms of time spent with direct teacher instruction and then students actually writing, how does that look?

Sally Bergquist: Most of the time is writing. Depending on the lesson, it would be anywhere from five to fifteen minutes, five being more kindergarten, and ten to fifteen as kids get into a little more complicated things.

The group lesson is direct instruction of a new concept, saying this is what we're going to do.

Then the majority of the time would be writing and giving feedback, because feedback is really important. I'm not sitting at my desk while they're writing. I'm walking around giving really explicit feedback about what they need to fix, and that's the teaching moment right there. Those are the teachable moments.

Anna Geiger: In the Writing Workshop model, we'd call those conferences. I know I've also heard the term butterfly conferences which would just be quick checking in, not necessarily pulling up a chair and spending five minutes, especially in kindergarten.

Can you maybe give us some examples of what that feedback might look like?

Sally Bergquist: Let's say it's first grade, and they're learning to take words and make them into a sentence and put punctuation in. I would give the words; this is in a workbook.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Sally Bergquist: The words say, "my dad likes to cook he makes pancakes." How are you going to make that into two sentences? We probably have done some examples together. We're figuring out what letters would be capital and the periods.

Now this would be the part of the lesson that I would expect everyone needs to complete correctly. During that time, I'm walking around and I'm saying, "Oh, I think you missed a capital. Can you figure out where that would be?" I wouldn't say it right away. I wouldn't tell them where it is. I would say, "I'll come back in a minute and see if you found where that should be." Then by the end of that time, they've all done it correctly. That lesson doesn't end with some kids not having gotten it. That's really important.

I would also have a challenge they could go onto because some of the kids are going to finish that super fast and some of the kids are going to take a long time with it. It's going to be harder. I would have a challenge, a prompt, free writing, or something else that they go on to do. There's no, "I'm done." Everybody's writing the whole time.

Anna Geiger: You're having an expectation as to what they're going to write, at least at the first part of the lesson. Does this carry through the primary grades or is this more of a beginner thing?

Sally Bergquist: Yes, that carries through. There's always a skills lesson, and the skills lessons build on each other. So the lesson that we did one day, the next day is just going to be a little different, a little harder. It's not going to be a brand new thing. Then the day after that, it's going to be a little more so that the kids who have never written before they came to school... There's no opportunity for anybody to get lost.

Anna Geiger: Okay. Would you call this dictation, where you're telling them exactly what to write?

Sally Bergquist: No, it's more of practicing the skill that we've just learned. It could be handwriting, in second grade it could be creating a sentence with a when and a where and a conjunction. Maybe there are boxes where they fill in a when and a where and add a conjunction and add an end of a sentence, but it's not dictation.

Anna Geiger: Then, as the students are doing their spelling, I'm assuming the teachers are holding kids accountable for the spelling patterns they've taught them. How does that look?

Sally Bergquist: Well, with my program, they tend to generate a lot of writing in one writing lesson because there's the skills part and then they can free write or do a prompt, so it's impossible to fix all the spelling. I'm mainly focused on them getting the skill piece, and the spelling in the skill piece needs to be correct.

However, if I'm walking around and I see somebody misspelling the word "said" or "where" or "play" or a word that they should know for their grade level, I will definitely have them correct that. I would say, "Hmm. That's a first grade word. That's one of the words we've learned."

Some kids really won't write unless ... They stop if they don't know how to spell the word.

Anna Geiger: How do you handle that?

Sally Bergquist: I always say guess and go. I tell them to underline it. Underline the word that you know is misspelled, and I will come back to it when I'm coming around to your part of the room and I will write it out for you and you can change it. But for learning how to write, it's really important that kids get the fluency. They knew in my room, it's not okay just to sit and wait. You need to keep going.

Anna Geiger: Being stuck on having to spell it conventionally is a stumbling block for some kids. If they're committed to that, then they just can't move forward. There's also research that says that students benefit from using the sound spellings they know to use invented spelling or estimated spelling, whatever people want to call it. But I also agree that if there's a word that they should know how to spell, then you could stop and teach that to them.

Also, I think ... I know with one of my kids when he was young, he's 15 now, but when he was little and I was just doing writing with him at home, he would cry if he didn't know how to spell a word. I did the same thing, exactly what you said. I said, "Well, you can circle it in pencil really lightly, and I will come back to it later."

He was the kind of kid that would remember it after I told him, so it was useful actually for me to tell him. Teachers have to decide what's useful. What is this child going to remember from this? Or am I just telling them a string of letters to write?

Sally Bergquist: Yes. Yes.

Anna Geiger: There has to be some understanding there.

Sally Bergquist: Now, the other time that spelling would come in is if the writing was going to be a final piece. Some of the pieces of writing that they do would start out as free writing, and then we would have a project that we would do where they'd take one of those pieces and I would do some editing mostly for them, and I would fix the spelling. When they do their final piece, that spelling needs to be correct. That's the other time that the spelling would be corrected.

Anna Geiger: That's an interesting thought because I just gave an in-person spelling workshop recently and we talked about that. I had someone come up to me after and ask, "Can I put things up in the hall if the spelling is not conventional?"

I've always struggled with that a little bit because with the really young kids, sometimes asking them to rewrite their piece can be really, really hard. I think I've done both. Sometimes I've typed it with the corrections and they've illustrated it and then it goes in the hall, or I told her that something you could do is put their best work in the hall with almost a disclaimer like, this is how spelling works with young kids and this is what we're doing.

Do you have any thoughts about that?

Sally Bergquist: I tend to have kids do the right spelling if it's going to be a final product. Now I would feel differently if there's an ongoing thing in the hall every week. Some years I've had clips in the room where we're just constantly putting up new things.

Anna Geiger: It maybe depends too the length of the writing. If they're writing two sentences about a picture, maybe the expectation there can be we're going to fix all these words and copy them correctly. But if they've actually written a whole story, and oh my goodness, they've worked so hard to write the story, and then they have to copy it again, that can be a little-

Sally Bergquist: Yeah, I know. They hate that, but it really makes them proud at the end if they do do that. They're so proud. They have put so much work into it. I will say that I think grade level matters a lot in that too.

Anna Geiger: Yes, for sure.

Let's talk about quantity of writing. When I was doing Writing Workshop, I followed Lucy Calkins and all her recommendations. Of course we know that she's really off base with reading, and a lot of the writing too. There wasn't really a lot of explicit instruction in some of her lessons, and there was a big focus on just getting them to write - just write, just write, just write, just write. Versus let me teach you how to write. It was a lot of expectation that there would be a lot on the paper.

I remember when I started ... I don't think I followed Lucy Calkins at this point, but my first year of teaching I was teaching third, fourth, and fifth grade, and I had a third-grader who loved to write. He loved to write! I did Writing Workshop, and he'd just do pages and pages, but I could not for the life of me figure out anything of what he wrote! The handwriting was pretty bad, but also the ideas were so confusing. There was no connection. Even though he was technically doing what he was supposed to be doing, he was producing a lot of writing, looking back, I can say, well, what exactly did that accomplish? What was he getting better at? There has to be a line there.

What's your perspective on how to work students up to more writing and how do you decide when your expectation should change?

Sally Bergquist: There's a part of me that really agrees with the fluency piece that kids do need to write a lot, but I think they also need that skills lesson where they're not allowed to do that. The lesson has nothing to do with what they're writing about; it's more of an exercise. They get exercise. It's like if you're doing a sport, you do a warmup. You do drills. Or in math, you do drills. You learn your math facts.

With a kid like that, there would be certain times when you say, "Okay, your job is to write three sentences that..." (Assuming they're up to that level - the sentence level.) "That have to do with a time that you got wet or went swimming or something like that, and I expect periods and..." All the things that they're not doing. "I expect neat handwriting. It needs to be neat."

The problem is that some kids have never had to stop and do that, and so by that time, there's spacing, there's handwriting, there's so much. It's a lot easier just to have them acquire the skills along the way. Spacing is a skill that needs to be taught that makes it easier to read kids' writing. That's another thing in the writing pyramid that often is overlooked in early writing. You just assume spacing is easy.

Anna Geiger: I like your analogy there of sports where kids need to practice writing a complete sentence or maybe more than one sentence on a topic, and it's closely monitored and feedback is right there before we necessarily set them off to do it. Or maybe if there's time they can do it, but that may not be the focus. Our focus might be on helping them perfect those skills in the smaller activity, and then as time goes on, we transfer those expectations to the longer writing. Would that be true?

Sally Bergquist: Yeah, and the nice thing is that when you've taught something, then when you're going around and giving feedback, you can say, "Remember when-

Anna Geiger: Exactly.

Sally Bergquist: "Remember yesterday we practiced with this?"

And they can go, "Oh, right," and you're not going around trying to explain something that doesn't make sense to them or that they haven't practiced.

Anna Geiger: Yes, agreed.

This makes me think more about ... And I'm not going to promise to be an expert on Lucy Calkins' Writing Workshop program, but in some of the lessons I've seen and used, it was a lot of focus more on content than on foundational skills. Everyone talks about the small moment. How many small moments do we have to write about? It wasn't a lot of, like you said, going back and saying, remember when we talked about how to form a sentence? There wasn't much of that that I saw. Maybe things have changed, but not when I saw it. It's that assuming side again, assuming that they can write a small moment without all these foundational skills.

Speaking of foundational skills, I hear this question a lot. How do I teach kindergarteners to write a sentence? How do I even begin? What are your thoughts on that?

Sally Bergquist: Yeah. Well, I don't introduce sentence writing until they can write four to six lines of writing on their own. I think it's important to introduce concepts when children are ready to use them, otherwise a sentence is just a vague concept. They aren't ready to use punctuation until they can generate a certain amount of writing.

When most of the class can generate four to six lines of writing, which would equal several sentences, that's when I would say, "Hey everyone, you are writing so much. Now we're going to learn about where periods go." If they can't apply it to what they're doing, there's not much motivation.

Anna Geiger: That's interesting. I haven't heard of it being done that way. It'd be interesting to hear what other people think about waiting until they can produce a lot of writing, because, as you say, then it applies.

Sally Bergquist: Yes.

Anna Geiger: It applies to what they're doing. It's an interesting way to think about it.

Sally Bergquist: This also has to do with cognitive overload. Punctuation takes a huge amount of mental space to figure out. If kids are still not to the point where they can figure out a lot of sound spelling or how to just keep going with words on the page, now you're adding another layer. You're saying, "Now make sure you get all the periods where they go," while they're still trying to figure out what they're going to say and the words and the spacing and the handwriting. That's another reason why I wait, because it's adding a huge layer of mental burden, thinking burden.

For teaching how to write a sentence or what a sentence is, I start with picture cards - a who and a doing what. I don't start with their own writing. I start with them writing a sentence based on pictures, and they're silly. It has to be fun! All these basic skill things have to be fun, so the cards are funny. You might pick an octopus driving a bus or something, and then your sentence is, "The octopus drives the bus."

Then it's writing a sentence and then learning to add another sentence. A big mistake that kids make is when there's a pronoun coming up, they don't start a new sentence. "The octopus drives the bus she drives the bus to school."

Anna Geiger: A lot of adults do that too, actually!

Sally Bergquist: Yeah, that is part of the code to crack. I've found there are certain things that if you can crack them, it solves half the problems right there. So learning what a pronoun is, and then learning to look for did you start a new sentence? Then the rule is if there's a conjunction there, oh, it keeps going. If they know what a pronoun is and a conjunction is, right there, they've cracked a big code of punctuation.

Anna Geiger: So your writing program integrates handwriting, sentence structure, syntax, and grammar, all those things come together?

Sally Bergquist: Yes, when they're ready for it.

Anna Geiger: During the writing time that the students have, you've talked about prompts, you've talked about writing what they want to write. Do you have a preference for that? Do they always get to choose if they do a prompt or write on their own? And do you have strong feelings about the use of prompts?

In the past, I was always very anti-prompt, probably because when I was at school there was no instruction with a prompt. It was just the prompt was there and you were just supposed to write, there was no instruction. Maybe you can talk to me about that.

Sally Bergquist: Yeah, I think they're both really important. Some students will get stuck on one topic and they will write about that every day if you let them unless they're directed otherwise. But if kids have a prompt every time they write, or it's always a teacher-led activity with a final product, and it's always within certain bounds, then writing becomes something they're doing for someone else. They don't own it.

I think when we allow kids to write something just because they feel like writing about it that day, there are some really cool things that happen. As we get to know them better, we find out what's going on their lives and what they're interested in, and other kids in the class get to know them better, especially if you have a sharing time which I think is extremely important. I always had a sharing time as part of my writing lesson, because that's what writing is for. It's for sharing with people, so that's really cool. We get to know them better.

The other thing is that I discover hidden talents when I let kids write about what they want. I had a second grader who watched the History Channel, and he would write about these historical battles or historical castles or things like that and write about these facts, and it was amazing! The other kids in the class got to learn from his example.

That's the other thing, they get ideas from each other when they can do that. If somebody writes a story about a butterfly, as soon as you know it, the other girls are all writing about butterflies. I'm being a little bit gender-specific there, but that tends to be how it is. Or you find out who has a sense of humor. Some kids are just hilarious, and you just wouldn't have known if you hadn't given them that chance to write about what they want and introduce them to different genres.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. That is something I remember, absolutely, is that you really got to know your kids as writers.

As a mom now, a couple of my kids really enjoy writing. One of them is my third son, he's 12, and just this morning he was printing "The Daily Pickle," which is the newsletter he writes about our family. With six kids, there's always something going on. A lot of his stories are completely made up, and he's usually the hero, but they're very funny.

We could go on and on, but as I told you, I have to run so we'll have to wind it up, but I would like you to spend a couple of minutes talking about your writing program. I'll also be sure to link to anything you want me to link to in the show notes so people can learn more about it, especially your writing pyramid article and other things that you've summarized very nicely on your website.

Talk to us a little bit about your program, why you wrote it, and who it's for.

Sally Bergquist: Yeah. Well, I took twenty years to write it, seven years for each grade level, so there's been a lot of trial and error that went into it. I'm very proud of that because I think there's no program that you're going to buy that has spent that many years-

Anna Geiger: Being tested and updated, right?

Sally Bergquist: Yeah, and it's also been tested by a number of other teachers around the country. I tested it on other teachers in my school and district as I was doing it and got feedback. So yeah, it's just very complete. There's no doubt.

The teachers that have tried it have told me that it's so comforting because they can just turn the page the next day and it's like, ah, here's what I'm going to do. They don't have to plan over the weekend and figure out what comes next.

Teachers have also told me it's so nice because the kids know the routine.

Anna Geiger: Yeah.

Sally Bergquist: They can actually run it themselves. They know exactly what's expected.

That's the other thing I've found that's really important. The workbooks are the same, the lessons are different, but it's the same format. They relax into it. They relax into it because they know you're not going to be throwing something brand new at them all the time.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, there's a lot to be said for that. A lot.

Sally Bergquist: Yes.

Anna Geiger: I'll make sure to link in the show notes to your website and your programs where people can learn more.

Thank you so much for taking time to talk to me about teaching writing, especially in kindergarten. I know that's a hard thing for teachers to wrap their heads around, so hopefully we got into some practical weeds here so some people could see what this looks like in a real classroom.

Sally Bergquist: Great! Well, it's been wonderful. Thank you!

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode167.

I do encourage you to check out Sally's website, and particularly her program, Growing Writers. Just a note, if you're looking at it and the price seems too high for you, note that if you are a classroom teacher and your district will not pay for it, she does offer a discount. Scroll down and you'll see her email address where you can contact her for help deciding if the program is right for you.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next time!

Closing: That's all for this episode of Triple R Teaching. For more educational resources, visit Anna at her home base, themeasuredmom.com, and join our teaching community. We look forward to helping you reflect, refine, and recharge on the next episode of Triple R Teaching.

Scroll back to top




Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by




Sally Berquist’s resources Growing Writers website Growing Writers program The research behind the Growing Writers program

Pre-order my new book and get a FREE bonus!

You’ll love this reader-friendly guide to the science of reading! Learn how to put the research into action so you can reach ALL readers. Pre-order before July 23 and get my Science of Reading Mini-Course – FREE!

PRE-ORDER NOW

The post How to give explicit writing instruction in the primary grades – with Sally Bergquist appeared first on The Measured Mom.