My Favourite Prewriting Strategy
The Quickdraw Prewriting Strategy Lesson and writing sheets can be downloaded at the end of this post.
Do you have an effective strategy to help your young authors plan their writing? I used to simply have my students orally share writing ideas and then send them to their desks to write about what they talked about. As you can probably imagine, there were always numerous children who sat staring down at their paper or gazing up in the air saying, “I don’t know what to write about!” If this happens in your classroom, I have an effective prewriting strategy that you might like to check out!
As you know, the traditional writing process includes planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. Teaching our young authors effective planning strategies is essential to creating enthusiastic and successful writers. Orally sharing their writing ideas is essential. However, after that important discussion is done, they need to plan on paper. My favourite prewriting strategy to teach students at the beginning of the year is the quickdraw.
What is the Quickdraw Prewriting Strategy?
As the name implies, the quickdraw prewriting strategy is completed quickly. Students create simple, stick figures and other very simple drawings of who they’re writing about, what event they’re writing about, and where the event happened. Once they’re familiar with the strategy, or if you’re teaching students in Grade 2+, they also make quickdraws for when the event happened.
Two Purposes of the Quickdraw Prewriting Strategy
For student authors, the purpose of quickdraws is to remind their brains of what they plan to write about.
I tell my students that when we start writing sentences, our brains are so busy figuring out what to write and how to spell words that we sometimes forget what we were going to say about our topic. Looking at our quickdraws reminds our brain of those details.
The extra benefit to having students do quickdraws is how this planning strategy aids the teacher’s support of student writers.
As you circulate while students are writing, their quickdraws make it easier to coach these young authors to compose sentences. You don’t have to continually ask, “What did you plan to write about?” since the quickdraws provide the answer. Instead, you can cue students by saying, “Tell me about your quickdraw.” Once they do, your response will often be, “Great! Write that down!”
Quickdraws Are Not Illustrations
Many students are disappointed when they learn how to do quickdraws because they want to create a picture to go with their writing. By explaining the purpose of quickdraws and assuring students will have the opportunity to illustrate their writing once it’s done, students gain an understanding of the planning process. For this reason, the first thing to clarify for students is the difference between a quickdraw and an illustration.
What the Quickdraw Prewriting Lesson Looks Like
As with all our instruction, we need to model the writing process for our students. After deciding on the writing topic, follow these steps to ensure students experience success in composing their personal narratives.
Model your quickdraws.
Have students talk to a partner about what they’ll draw.
Students make their own quickdraws.
Model how you write sentences from your quickdraws.
Have students tell their partner what their first sentence will be.
Students write sentences that explain all the information in their quickdraws.
Download your copy of a The Quickdraw Prewriting Strategy Lesson Plan for Personal Narratives.
You might like to visit My Shop for a Google Slide deck that goes along with the Quickdraw Prewriting Strategy lesson plan.
You might also like to check out the next stage of using the quickdraw prewriting strategy. Visit My Shop for a resource called Beginning, Middle, and End Personal Narrative Lessons. Click on this button to check it out.
