Hello colleagues, I wanted to share a useful document from our wonderrful colleague Ronna Magy with oodles of ideas for "scaffolding and supporting emerging writers."
As Ronna explains, “A writing frame consists of a skeleton outline given to learners to scaffold their writing. By providing a few sentence starters and some rhetorical phrases common to the task or genre, frames give learners a structure that allows them to focus on expressing their thoughts. They also help learners incorporate vocabulary they have learned in a given topic and create more sophisticated sentences and paragraphs……” Paragraph frames: • Provide a structure on which to hang ideas
• Provide sentence starters
• Provide support for struggling writers
• Can be differentiated to stretch more competent writers
(U.S. Department of Education Office of Vocational and Adult Education. Just Write! Guide pp. 46-47)."
Ronna's document includes a number of examples of paragraph frames.
It would be great to hear from teachers who are using paragraph frames as well as from those who are interested in this type of scaffold for supporting learners' writing.
Cheers, Susan Finn Miller
Moderator, English Language Acquisition CoP