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By GLEN WERLING
It may sound like math — 6 + 1 — but at Lancaster Elementary School, it’s also a way of teaching students writing skills.
“6 + 1 Traits is basically pulling the writing apart, so that it’s easier for kids,” said Lancaster 6 + 1 Traits coach for grades 3-5, Cathy Dunwiddie.
“When I started teaching, we thought teaching kids writing consisted of giving them prompts and then telling them, ‘Here, write about snow,’” she added.
For some children that worked OK, but for others, it was an absolute struggle. “And we as teachers wondered why they weren’t writing very well,” said Dunwiddie.
Some children could write fluently when presented with a topic and others, while they grasping the basic mechanics of writing, when asked to write spontaneously, they seemed lost.
But 6 + 1 empowers teachers to assess student writing skills by breaking it down into smaller parts, said Dunwiddie.
6 + 1 was developed by Ruth Culham Ed.D., president of The Culham Writing Company and former Unit Manager of the Assessment Program at Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland, Ore.
The 6 + 1 comes from six features that teachers search for in a student’s writing—ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency and conventions—plus the one final step the student makes in writing about a subject—how the student’s written story is presented.
For ideas, teachers determine if a child has knowledge of the topic, has paired pictures with the writing that matches the words, provides lots of details, uses multiple sentences that make sense and stays on the topic.
For voice, the teacher determines if the child as a writer is attempting to make a solid connection with the reader, if the feeling and attitude of the writer is discernible, and if the child makes the proper word choice, uses proper punctuation and how he or she conveys his or her own voice in the piece.
For sentence fluency, the teachers look for sentences that are easy to read aloud, that are complete and not cut-off or run-on, and that are varied in length and type.
For organization, teachers seek stories that have a definitive beginning, middle and end in a logical order and sequence and make simple transitions.
For word choice, teachers are looking for specific words, rather than general or vague words plus they want to see students use the right word in the right location of the story. Teachers also search for synonym usage and words that have impact on the reader. The usage of “big words” is sought (regardless if they are spelled correctly or phonetically) as are words that stimulate the five senses. Action verbs are desired.
Finally, conventions, the teachers are looking for proper word spacing, letter formation, writing on a line, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, grammar and mechanics.
“We take an hour every day for writing workshop and teach small lessons to the kids, each about 10 minutes long. The lesson is broken down into teaching them how to pump up their ideas, or how to choose good words for their piece,” said Dunwiddie, adding, “We teach kids how to write now instead of just telling them to write about a particular subject.”
According to K-2 6 + 1 Traits coach, Joyce Seck, the Six Traits was a perfect fit for Lancaster’s Writing Workshop and Literacy Collaborative.
“The 6 + 1 Traits fits right into Writing Workshop because it’s teaching kids how to write,” said Seck, observing that 6 + 1 is becoming a common teaching method in the area. The method is used in the Bluffton-Harrison school system and at Ossian Elementary.
Seck displayed how she takes her students from the rough draft stage of writing through the revision stage by highlighting words and phrases and teaching them how to make better word choices.
As an example she displayed excerpts from a story by a female student who had revised a sentence to read, “hung in the cold lonely air.” Cold may be a common choice for a student to make when describing air, but the word lonely is a descriptive word that demonstrates the ability imparted to children through 6 + 1.
As the child revised her writing, she learned how to make it more descriptive. The final draft includes all corrections to spelling, grammar, etc.
Not only does 6 + 1 teach children how to write, but how to organize their thoughts.
According to Dunwiddie, the students are also assessed with rubrics so that they know what they need to do to communicate to their audience through the text of their message and demonstrate each feature of the six traits.
One method of teaching students through 6 + 1 is the use of a “mentor text” to model to the children what is expected of them. Often articles are chosen that have a special meaning to the children. “For example when Norwell went to state in baseball and football, those articles meant a lot to kids and they used those as mentor texts to help them learn how to write,” said Dunwiddie.
“When you’re learning to write, you have to break things down into smaller pieces, so as these children get older, it will become second nature. Then they will not have to think so hard about ideas because it will be second nature to them,” Dunwiddie said.
Although the 6 + 1 method is only in its second year of use at Lancaster, writing scores have showed improvement as have scores on the writing applications portion of the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress (ISTEP) test.
Perhaps one grade where the 6 + 1 Writing Traits has had an amazing impact is at the kindergarten level. Students now not only write sentences, but write them in story form with a logical order, observed Seck.
“Our belief here at Lancaster is that reading and writing have to be taught side-by-side,” said Seck. “6 + 1 is just such a perfect program to build the foundation of what our students need as they advance to the middle school and even on to the high school,” she concluded.