Are you convinced of the importance of writing across the curriculum, but tired of the blank stare you get when you ask for a paragraph on a topic your child has just read about? Do you love the idea of bring-your-own-content writing curricula like Write by Number or Sprouts but get overwhelmed by coming up with writing prompts for different subject areas? You’re not alone, and the solution lies in understanding what kinds of writing prompts are helpful for students at various levels. There is an art to writing effective prompts, and it all comes down to asking the right questions.
The very youngest students are still learning to form letters. Handwriting is still so cognitively intensive that a student may not register the meaning of what they’re writing at all, or if they do, it is only after the word or sentence is in front of them on the page. For these students, you can pose a factual question orally, scribe their response as a complete sentence, and then ask them to copy key words from that sentence. Those key words will often be names, terms defined in the reading, or other important vocabulary.
For example, after reading a page about fish to your kindergartner, you might pose the question Where do fish live? and write down the student’s oral response: Fish live in water. The child would then practice writing the words fish and water. This is also an opportunity to review phonics rules and basic mechanics: the word fish is written with a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence but not otherwise.
A slightly older student—one in first grade—might copy the whole sentence and then, with your help, work through an abbreviated mechanics checklist focusing on capitalization and end punctuation to reinforce these rules.
A second grader can write up to three sentences independently as a rudimentary paragraph. Prompts for this age should be very specific about what information is to be included. For example, let’s say you want your student to write a paragraph about the living environments of fish, based on a reading that has told them that some fish live in salt water and others, in fresh water. Your prompt might read as follows:
In what two kinds of water do fish live?
The resulting response might look like this:
Fish live in two kinds of water. Some fish live in salt water. Other fish live in fresh water.
Note that the prompt makes it clear that the student needs to identify two and only two things from their reading: the two types of water fish live in. At this stage, a more general prompt like Where do fish live? could elicit either a simplistic answer appropriate for a younger child (“in water, silly!”) or answers—pet shops, the local aquarium, the fish tank at the dentist’s office in Finding Nemo—that are true but not germane to the lesson. Be specific.
Students in grades three through five can respond to prompts that use academic vocabulary like identify, describe, or compare as well as domain-specific vocabulary. Such prompts typically call for complete paragraphs with supporting examples. For example, a prompt about adaptations to aquatic environments might read: Describe three adaptations that fish evolved to survive in deep-sea environments. Students at the younger end of this age range could respond to this prompt with a simple five-sentence paragraph, while those at the upper end could write an expanded paragraph of eight-eleven sentences with additional examples and information. Notice that the prompt specifies the number of examples (three adaptations) and limits the scope (deep-sea environments) so that students know exactly what is expected of them. At this stage, simple annotation and note-taking strategies like underlining key information or listing examples help students gather information, while graphic organizers like the single-paragraph outline (SPO) from The Writing Revolution assist them in organizing their writing.
In middle school, prompts remain specific and limited in scope, but they can include more how and why questions. For example, a prompt for this age group on adaptations might focus on a specific example from their reading—bioluminescence in deep-sea fish, say—and ask the student to describe the mechanism of the adaptation and how it benefits the organism. In middle school and beyond, prompts should also specify the length of the response: a single paragraph, a three-, four- or five-paragraph essay, etc. Here, for example, is a prompt from EWS Level H-2 for an essay on Homer’s Odyssey:
Odysseus stands out among the heroes of ancient Greek literature for his intelligence and cunning, but his wife, Penelope, is no less clever. In a four-paragraph essay, compare the ways these two characters use metis (practical wisdom, craftiness, strategic thinking) to their advantage. What do their similarities say about them as a couple?
Through at least 10th grade, I recommend you keep prompts specific and limited in scope when writing about academic content. Once students have built a broad knowledge base and developed their analytical skills through close reading can they tackle more open-ended questions that require them to evaluate arguments or bring together examples from disparate fields. This is the work of upper high school and college.
Like any art, creating good writing prompts takes practice, practice, practice. Don’t worry if some of yours don’t hit the mark. Like your student, you will learn to revise and try again.