Webinar Transcript

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Karly O'Brien: All right, well, want to make sure we have enough time to go through all of the awesome content we have tonight, so I'm going to go ahead and get started, and welcome, everyone. We're so super glad to have you here for today's Every Educator Counts webinar. Tonight's topic is handwriting, syntax, and the secret sauce of Strong Writers. Whether you're returning or joining us for the first time, we're super excited to have you. Just a quick reminder that this session, as well

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Karly O'Brien: any other session we've facilitated before is available in our archive, and I'll be sure to drop the link in the chat throughout the session later this evening.

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Karly O'Brien: Just wanted to let you also know that closed captioning is available, and we invite you to engage throughout the session using the chat and Q&A to share thoughts or questions, seeing folks are already doing that, so please continue to do that.

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Karly O'Brien: Today's session takes a closer look at writing and the many skills that come together to support it. Writing, I'm sure, as you all know, is far more complex than putting words on paper. It involves a coordinated system of transcription, syntax, executive functioning, and working memory. So, in this session, we'll focus on how handwriting supports early writing development.

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Karly O'Brien: And why syntax instruction plays such an important role in helping students become effective writers. So, throughout the session, our guest facilitator will share practical classroom-ready strategies that you can use starting tomorrow to strengthen writing instruction and better support your students, to develop confidence and independence in their writing.

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Karly O'Brien: So, for anyone new joining us today, we are Reading is Fundamental, or RIF, the nation's largest children's literacy nonprofit. We are turning 60 this year, super exciting, and our mission is to inspire a love of reading and ensure every child has the opportunities and resources needed to become a lifelong reader. And, webinars like this one are one of the ways we support educators and families with meaningful research-based practices.

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Karly O'Brien: That you can use right away.

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Karly O'Brien: So I'm really excited to be joined today by Amy Sierra-Cusano, founder of Know Better, Do Better Literacy, LLC. Amy brings 25 years of experiences in public education, having served as a classroom teacher, learning specialist, Title I teacher, vice principal, literacy specialist, and adjunct professor. She is nationally recognized literacy consultant who has presented

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Karly O'Brien: widely on topics including assessment, dyslexia, reading, and writing.

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Karly O'Brien: Amy is also a member of Decoding Dyslexia Maryland, serves on the board of directors for the Reading League, is an Acadians training specialist, and teaches in the Advanced Reading Science program at Brooklyn College. She is deeply committed to ensuring educators have the knowledge and tools to support strong literacy outcomes so that all students leave second grade as proficient.

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Karly O'Brien: readers and writers. Amy now lives in Southern Maryland with her husband and two daughters, and I'm super excited to learn from her tonight, so with that, I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and turn it over to you, Amy, to share yours, and I'm super excited for the session.

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Amy Siracusano: Thank you for that introduction, Carly, I really appreciate it. All right, you guys, just give me a minute to go ahead and get my screen up here, and we will go ahead and get going.

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Amy Siracusano: I think you're going to see my daughters for one moment here.

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Amy Siracusano: There we go.

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Amy Siracusano: All right. So, thank you for being here, for our discussion this evening around handwriting, syntax, and what we really need to develop strong writers. I really appreciate Carly's, introduction, from me. One thing I just want to add, my role at the Reading League after 8 years of being on the board ended in December. I probably sent my bio in

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Amy Siracusano: prior.

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Amy Siracusano: to tonight, but it just recently ended, but it was a fabulous 8 years, and if you ever want to reach out to me, you can reach me, through my website, www.knowbetterdoBetterliteracy.com. So…

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Amy Siracusano: Let's go ahead and get started. Tonight's take-home messages, I have four of them for you. The first is for you to leave understanding that when we teach writing, we are teaching two broad categories of skills, transcription and composition. They are taught differently.

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Amy Siracusano: Transcription skills need to be taught to automaticity, and composition skills are a bit more strategic, and they develop, in-depth over time.

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Amy Siracusano: I'm also going to hopefully leave you with a little bit of thought around well-designed scoring tools that can really help to pinpoint instructional needs, and then what are these tools that we need to support students' executive functions when reading? I'm sorry, when writing. So, it's a lot to dig into, so we will go ahead and get started. Now, the work that I'm going to talk to you about will really lean into a lot of the research by Dr. Virginia Berninger.

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Amy Siracusano: And she talks about the four language modalities. Language by ear, language by eye, language by mouth, and language by hand.

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Amy Siracusano: And when we go to develop, writers, writing by hand, we have to do everything we do in reading, plus more, because writing is a production task.

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Amy Siracusano: And the oral language is really the key to all of this. So, how we develop, and I don't know how this got, twisted here, but we first, when we're born, or even in the womb, language by ear is developing, right? It's very natural for most children, most typically developing children, right?

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Amy Siracusano: And then slowly, children learn to babble words, right? This language by mouth.

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Amy Siracusano: This oral language, this expressive language, and then when we enter school, we learn to lift print off the page. This is this language by eye, lifting print off the page.

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Amy Siracusano: And then slowly, over many years of development, we learn how to put our thoughts on the paper using language by hand. But we require the use of all of these modalities in order to do that well, and like I said, oral language is critical in this development. So as I talk to you tonight, and anything that I say to you, please think through the lens of oral language first. What would this look like

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Amy Siracusano: Orally, before I put print in front of children.

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Amy Siracusano: As I mentioned, I am, going to lean into the not-so-simple view of writing and, some of Dr. Virginia Berninger's, work. This model was developed in 2006, and the original model in 2003 was called the Simple View of Writing.

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Amy Siracusano: Unlike the simple view of reading, for those of you that are familiar with that, there is no multiplication sign, okay? This is the model.

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Amy Siracusano: At the center of the model is a triangle. I like to think of this metaphorically as a volcano, and I want to keep students' working memory, cognitive flow, nice and calm and dormant. So, what I'm doing with you all this evening is I'm looking at my slide, and I'm retrieving from my cognitive flow, from my working memory, from my long-term memory.

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Amy Siracusano: all of the things that I want to say to you, right? Using my oral language.

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Amy Siracusano: When I go to do that in print, I have to think through the things that I know about a topic in order to be able to get them out on paper.

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Amy Siracusano: The things that are around the outside of this triangle, or how I think of it as a volcano, are the things that we're teaching and supporting in the classroom. So, things like transcription skills. These are foundational writing skills. Text generation, this is a child's ability to use words and sentences and discourse. What is it going to look like on paper? Some of us may refer to this as written expression or composition.

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Amy Siracusano: And then, how do we support executive functions? How do we support supervisory attention to what kids are doing in the classroom? Not just setting them off and saying, hey, go write about whatever you want to write about today, right? We're giving them some guidance, some… some,

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Amy Siracusano: some support in that work. How are we supporting them in goal setting, right? What are we doing in setting goals

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Amy Siracusano: in relation to the piece of work that they're working on, whether it's oral language development or whether it's written language. And then thinking about supporting children in strategies for self-monitoring and regulating. So this might look like in the form of checklists.

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Amy Siracusano: For students, and that might look different for every child. Could also look like some graphic organizers or sentence frames, that sort of thing.

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Amy Siracusano: So, when we think about the research that is 20 years old, right, what does this mean for the classroom? Well, kids come to us with this working memory, this cognitive flow. Now, of course.

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Amy Siracusano: Long-term memory continues to develop as kids have more experiences, as all of us have more experience. That's our schema, right? As we have experience, our schema, our schemata is going to change, right? How we look at things.

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Amy Siracusano: executive function will continue to develop, and obviously, it's not going to be as strong in 3- and 4- and 5-year-olds as it should be in a 30-year-old or a 50-year-old, right? So this ability to kind of control impulses, focus, pay attention, stay on task, take turns, right? How do we support those things in the classroom with a very cognitive

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Amy Siracusano: cognitively demanding tasks, such as writing. And then what are we doing to teach these two broad categories of skills? Transcription skills, right, these foundational writing skills.

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Amy Siracusano: which need to be taught to automaticity. So, things like handwriting.

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Amy Siracusano: keyboarding, spelling, which please know, by the middle of second grade, spelling is going to start to lag behind reading. Reading is going to take off on this upward trajectory, and spelling is going to lag a little bit. For example.

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Amy Siracusano: If I asked you to write the word iridescence right now, or the city, Albuquerque, if you've never lived in Albuquerque and you've never had to write it before, could you write it with confidence without checking in how to spell it? You could absolutely read those words, no problem, but the spelling is going to always lag a little bit behind the reading. We have to know something about how the word works in order to be able to use

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Amy Siracusano: tools like Spellcheck to be able to decipher which one is correct.

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Amy Siracusano: Also, in foundational writing skills or transcription skills includes spatial organization, so thinking about how you're teaching kids about margins, right? Indenting, sizing and spacing, use of lines, that sort of thing. And then teaching punctuation, right? Not just ending punctuation marks, but all punctuation marks.

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Amy Siracusano: The other category of skills are composition skills, text generation, sometimes people call this written expression. These skills become increasingly strategic, they're cognitive tasks, they're more difficult, and they develop with intensity and complexity over time.

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Amy Siracusano: So this draws on a child's, topic knowledge of the world, of experiences.

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Amy Siracusano: what's in their word… word choice, right? So, if they're writing narrative text versus expository text.

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Amy Siracusano: the words that we use are going to be different. So, in narrative text, we might use more figurative language and descriptive language, versus in expository text, we might lean into more text structure and domain-specific vocabulary words.

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Amy Siracusano: Sentence structure is going to vary. I'm going to talk a bit about that tonight. Thinking about genre and format, text structure, and audience. And all of these things

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Amy Siracusano: Over many years of explicit, systematic, intentional instruction will come together so that we can develop proficient writers, or skilled writers.

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Amy Siracusano: The one thing that we are probably very familiar with is the writing process. And if you're like me, I spent, you know, 25 years in the classroom using the writing process, thinking that if I just kept modeling for kids what this looked like in the different phases of the writing process, they would be successful. And I was wrong, time and time again.

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Amy Siracusano: But where did the writing process come from, right? So…

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Amy Siracusano: In the late 1970s, Donald Graves, Donald Murray, they really kid-watched in classrooms, in primary classrooms, first-grade classrooms, and they noticed that there was a writing process that children went through, these kind of stages. They hypothesized how these stages of pre-writing and writing, rewriting, revision, kind of came together, right?

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Amy Siracusano: And they… they sat on the assumption that students' difficulties in each stage could be diagnosed more accurately if you kind of modeled and taught students how to perform within these stages. But that's really not the whole story, right?

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Amy Siracusano: And so, we have to think about, is this process enough

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Amy Siracusano: And I'm going to say no. So, this was the 1970s, right? And in 1980s, 1990s, we were big, heavy into the writing process.

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Amy Siracusano: And at the same time, around the 1980s, there were two, researchers, Flower and Hayes, that were mapping the mental behaviors of experienced writers at work. And these experienced writers were college-age students.

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Amy Siracusano: And they looked at things like the task and the environment, long-term memory. Think about that volcano, that triangle in the center of the 2006 model, right? Which was 20 years after this kind of research that Flower and Hayes were doing with college-age students. Working memory, right? Goal setting.

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Amy Siracusano: Part of that executive functions. And then this planning, translating, reviewing, and revising.

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Amy Siracusano: And what they noted.

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Amy Siracusano: is something that's really critical, is that you can see these bidirectional arrows. So we didn't really go through the writing process linearly, right? It wasn't Monday we plan, Tuesday we draft, Wednesday we review, we revise, and we publish on Friday. It was kind of happening in tandem.

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Amy Siracusano: Right?

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Amy Siracusano: The problem is, if all we do is put up a beautiful image of the writing process, and all we do is model through the stages of the writing process, we are assuming that students have the necessary transcription skills, those foundational writing skills, to be successful in going through this process.

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Amy Siracusano: So…

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Amy Siracusano: As much as the writing process isn't the whole story, it is part of the story, it's an important part of the story, and we need to make sure that our instruction is attending to all of the things in writing that are necessary to come together in order to be able to generate and build strong writers.

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Amy Siracusano: So, tonight, I'll talk a bit about handwriting and keyboarding in terms of automatizing these skills and where these play a role, and I'll also talk very briefly about the sentence and how important this is in developing skilled writers in terms of written expression and composition.

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Amy Siracusano: Considering that the writing process is a recursive process that we use in order to support students through this written expression phase. And these skills become increasingly strategic.

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Amy Siracusano: Well, let's talk a little bit about the,

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Amy Siracusano: The, research behind this not-so-simple view of writing in terms of transcription and handwriting.

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Amy Siracusano: So, transcription skills have to be automatic in order for students to write more complex pieces of text. When transcription skills are not automatic, higher order processes are impacted, and it will limit the student's ability to hold language and ideas as they are writing.

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Amy Siracusano: We also know from research that students who learn from teachers who have professional training in teaching handwriting demonstrate more improvement in transferring that into better composition.

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Amy Siracusano: Now, I usually can do these talks in front of 500, 1,000 teachers, and rarely do I have more than 5 people in an audience that size raise their hand and say they took a class in their higher ed coursework on teaching handwriting.

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Amy Siracusano: Maybe a few more people during in-service might have an hour training through somebody in a school district, but it is far and few between in which we really are trained well in how to teach handwriting, and this is a problem.

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Amy Siracusano: We know that students who receive explicit handwriting instruction perform significantly better in writing quality, writing productivity, and writing fluency compared to students that do not receive explicit handwriting instruction.

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Amy Siracusano: And many of you probably use a screener in your school systems, and part of that early literacy screening is letter naming fluency, which is a predictor for later reading ability. Well, research shows that automatic alphabet letter writing by hand is the best unique predictor for later composition length. So it is so vital that coming out of kindergarten.

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Amy Siracusano: We are assessing our students to see who can write the uppercase letters of the alphabet, and who can write the lowercase letters of the alphabet without a model, without prompting, because this is a strong predictor for later ability to be able to write extended pieces.

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Amy Siracusano: So, bottom line is, handwriting is a building block for transcription.

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Amy Siracusano: And it relies on things like fine motor skills. And unfortunately, more and more of our children are coming in with weaker, fine, and gross motor skills. So.

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Amy Siracusano: We might need to include in our early literacy programs our early, childhood programs, kindergarten centers that involved, fine motor activities and centers, so that we can get kids basically using what people might call their baby sharks or their pinchers, but those three fingers need to be developed muscularly in the hand in order to hold a writing utensil.

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Amy Siracusano: That's really important.

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Amy Siracusano: And there are a couple of different kinds of grips. The gold standard grip is the tripod grip.

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Amy Siracusano: And this is when the child will hold a writing utensil with the pointer finger and the thumb on either side of where, right at the top where the pencil narrows, so right where it stops narrowing, and it rests on the middle finger. But there are other exceptional functional grips, such as the quadrupod grip, in which instead of the child grasping it with the pointer finger and the thumb.

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Amy Siracusano: They would grasp the writing utensil with the thumb.

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Amy Siracusano: the pointer finger and the middle finger, and then the writing utensil would rest on the ring finger. Now, if you're concerned about, pencil grip for a particular child, make sure that you speak to an occupational therapist. They really can take a look at a child's hand for muscular,

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Amy Siracusano: Development, for bone structure, and all of that to kind of guide you through which grip might be the best, way to navigate holding a writing utensil.

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Amy Siracusano: The other thing that we know about developing strong writers is providing students with the right kinds of tools. Now, we in the classroom love these thick markers, these big, thick crayons, these big, thick markers, they last a long time, they don't break.

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Amy Siracusano: But, they are the worst thing for little hands.

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Amy Siracusano: We really need to be using short, thin writing utensils. Golf pencils. If kids have a really hard time with pressing down on the paper.

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Amy Siracusano: and you're seeing very light, pencil marks, you could, purchase

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Amy Siracusano: dry erase markers that are short and skinny, just like golf pencils, they exist, and have them use that so they don't have to press so hard until they get that muscular, fine motor development down so that they could write on the paper. You could also find lead in pencils that are a little softer, and that might also help, and crayons, skinny, short crayons.

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Amy Siracusano: And I say this because imagine right now if I asked you to take a writing utensil and tape it to the bottom of a yardstick.

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Amy Siracusano: And I told you, that's your writing utensil for the entire day, tomorrow.

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Amy Siracusano: Your hand would be exhausted.

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Amy Siracusano: So when we give kids tall, thick writing utensils, it's the worst thing that we could do for them.

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Amy Siracusano: When we're teaching.

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Amy Siracusano: instruction around writing, we want to start with, as Anita Archer would say, you know, scaffolds, we do, we do, we do, we do, big scaffolds, little scaffolds, to no scaffolds. So we want to start instruction before we get into letter writing with stroke development. We want to teach kids with consistent language, like top-down, left-right. We want to make sure that they're able to trace and copy

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Amy Siracusano: lines first, before we give them open spaces to do that. We want to provide them in Pre-K3 and Pre-K4 with open kinds of boxes, with just a baseline for them to kind of play around with formation of strokes and shapes. But after that, in kindergarten, when we start teaching penmanship and how to form the letters, we want to use three lines.

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Amy Siracusano: And this is going to be really critical, not only in the development of letters, but in numbers, punctuation marks, and for geometric shapes, and drawing other things in other subject areas. So these are lifelong skills.

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Amy Siracusano: Now, when we think about teaching a left-handed person versus a right-handed person, when it comes to teaching manuscript, or print, strokes are a little bit different. So, the vertical stroke

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Amy Siracusano: For a lefty and a righty, it's exactly the same. We all start at the top, and we pull down toward the body.

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Amy Siracusano: However.

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Amy Siracusano: When we are drawing or writing a horizontal stroke, we pull away from the body. So, a right-handed person will start

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Amy Siracusano: On the right side.

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Amy Siracusano: I'm sorry, on the left side, and pull away from the body, pull out to the right. A left-handed person will start at the right side, pull away from the body, out to the… to the, to the left. So I hope I said that right. A right-handed person starts at the left, and pulls away to the right. A left-handed person starts at the right, pulls away to the left. So we pull away from the body. It's very uncomfortable if you took your hand

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Amy Siracusano: And tried to swing it across the body.

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Amy Siracusano: So that you kind of touched your shoulder. It doesn't feel as comfortable as pulling away. So, pay attention to that. This doesn't exist in cursive, it's more so in manuscript, and unless a left-handed person has been forced to do it another way, most left-handed people will do it the way that I mentioned.

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Amy Siracusano: So, handwriting requires

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Amy Siracusano: Fine motor skills, appropriate paper, stroke development, stroke knowledge, instruction for 5 to 10 minutes a day, at a table. Not on a carpet, not on a whiteboard hunched over. Kids' elbows need to be on the table. The writing paper needs to fall

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Amy Siracusano: in line, parallel to the student's arm. And our arms, if we put our arm on the table, or elbow, and we let it naturally fall, will fall at about a 45 degree angle. So our paper should not be perpendicular to the edge of the desk.

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Amy Siracusano: They should be parallel and fall right in line with how the arm falls on the desk. This is really important in developing, and learning different letters. We need a feedback by a trained adult.

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Amy Siracusano: As students are forming letters, we want them to say the letter name or the letter sound that will help them to cement those letters into long-term memory, and we want to practice these skills until they are automatized, so kids can do it without thinking about it.

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Amy Siracusano: So, as I mentioned on the prior slide, and this is from research, when kids have learned the strokes, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, curved lines, and they're working on learning how to form uppercase and lowercase letters at the same time, they can do that if they know their strokes.

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Amy Siracusano: You want to tell them, on this particular line, you're gonna say the name of the letter as you're forming it, or on this particular line, you're gonna say the sound that the letter spells, and that will help to cement it into long-term memory.

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Amy Siracusano: And handwriting is an integration of three things. It's an integration of the orthographic codes, what the letters look like, the formations of the letters.

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Amy Siracusano: Phonological codes, the letter names and the letter sounds. When I say the name of a letter without even looking at it, I am producing sounds. When I say the sound that the letter makes without looking at a letter in print, right, this is oral language, this is phonological codes.

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Amy Siracusano: And for those two to come together, when we put pen to paper, we are activating the reading brain. We are activating the orthographic and the phonological processor on the left hemisphere of the brain when we put pen to paper, when we activate the graph of motor system. So the graph of motor system is graph means to write, motor means movement. That is our hand, putting our hand to paper, forming those written

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Amy Siracusano: shapes.

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Amy Siracusano: And as I mentioned, we want to have handwriting programs that support

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Amy Siracusano: kids, in that they have 3 lines, there's a top line, a midline, a bottom line, there's directional arrows, there's a number of steps, they have enough pages to practice, it's not a one lesson and we're done with it.

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Amy Siracusano: We're gonna do it until you learn it. You're learning digits, you're learning upper and lowercase letters, and you're learning punctuation marks.

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Amy Siracusano: Now, a lot of people will ask me about cursive, and I was so excited recently to see a new piece of research out, another one on cursive, so more and more information is coming out about this. But a few things to mention about cursive. There are some countries in the world that never teach manuscript. They go right to cursive, never teach print.

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Amy Siracusano: We in the United States were teaching cursive, no print, until about the 1930s, and then we shifted.

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Amy Siracusano: And at some point, we stopped teaching cursive altogether.

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Amy Siracusano: So, cursive, in and of itself, there's an efficiency to it, it's quicker than manuscript. Cuts down on reversals. All lowercase letters start in the same place at the bottom.

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Amy Siracusano: as you are forming these loops, and this is this research that recently came out, and it's not a lot of research, but it's a little bit, right? As we're forming the loops, there's no break in the words, so that reading brain on the left hemisphere is constantly activated, and so there's a little bit of evidence to show that this may support spelling development. We need it to read historical documents, it's a bit

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Amy Siracusano: faster, as I mentioned. It improves fine motor skills, and… When you sign your name.

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Amy Siracusano: it gives you an identity. And I heard from a woman the other day, she said, you know, Amy, my husband never learned to write in cursive, and when he went to get his passport, they wouldn't give it to him because he printed his name. He had to reapply for it.

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Amy Siracusano: So apparently for passports, or at least in this state, at this post office, they had to sign the name, and because he couldn't, he had to reapply for it, and he had to learn how to make some sort of signature.

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Amy Siracusano: So there are some things that it is critical for.

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Amy Siracusano: But there is a progression to all of this, right? So when we think about our youngest of learners, we want to develop those stroke development, spatial organization, fine motor skills.

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Amy Siracusano: And we want to make sure that we have a progression, a scope and sequence, a similar language, a systematic, explicit way in order to automatize a handwriting type.

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Amy Siracusano: Typically, typically, for most kids, it takes approximately 2 years to master a handwriting type, with 5 to 10 minutes of instruction daily.

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Amy Siracusano: with educator feedback, okay? That's typical. Now, with everything, we all learn along a continuum, so that could be a little less or a little more for some students, depending on, their needs.

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Amy Siracusano: So, think about your students. What do they need support with? Fine motor skills, pencil grips, sizing, spacing, use of lines and margins, are they taught about how to do that? Are they accurate without a model? How's their rate and automaticity? Do you provide feedback?

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Amy Siracusano: And…

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Amy Siracusano: One of the most important things in the room to get all this done is you, and your knowledge, educator knowledge. So.

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Amy Siracusano: What do you need? Training, materials, a program? How's your handwriting grip? Are you a lefty or a righty? What is it that you need to be… to serve your students well?

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Amy Siracusano: So, we talked a bit about handwriting, and we're gonna just briefly talk quickly about keyboarding, because

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Amy Siracusano: Keyboarding is an effective tool that we need to learn how to use, right? And unfortunately, across our nation, most of our states are having kids type extended responses using a keyboard for state assessments, so we can't really get away from it.

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Amy Siracusano: And, you know, keyboarding, we could type 3 times as many words as we can write by hand. We know that students with higher handwriting fluency tend to have better hand, keyboarding fluency. But here's the thing. There is a time and a place

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Amy Siracusano: for writing by hand, and there's a time and a place for keyboarding. So, there was a study released in the New York Times many years ago now, where an Ivy League school had a group of incoming freshmen. One class had to take their notes using a keyboard.

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Amy Siracusano: for the professor's lecture, and another class had to write their notes by hand, no technology allowed at all. They found the students who wrote their notes by hand learned the information better, and the reasoning for that is because they put their notes into their own words, they were summarizing and paraphrasing, there was metacognition occurring, versus the kids who were touch-typing the notes from the professor.

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Amy Siracusano: basically typed verbatim, and so they didn't internalize any of the information as they learned it.

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Amy Siracusano: And our technology companies, such as Microsoft, know this. They've released this piece of information from Europe when they released their laptop many years ago, their first laptop that folded backward, you came with a stylus, you could write on the screen, and it turned it into a Word document.

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Amy Siracusano: And in this piece of research that they shared when they released that laptop, they said when writing or drawing by hand, different parts of the brain are activated in different ways. It's the physical movement of the pen that makes the difference. Using a pen to take notes means the brain is able to process learning in a much more effective way.

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Amy Siracusano: So, I say this… Because we can't get away from keyboarding. It is an effective form of communication. But…

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Amy Siracusano: What's our guidance for having kids touch type versus handwrite?

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Amy Siracusano: So if one piece of guidance given to me in an informal conversation with Dr. Steve Graham from Arizona State University, he said, Amy, time your students for how many words they can write by hand. So let's say Michelle, a friend of mine who's on here tonight, writes 10 words per minute by hand. I time her.

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Amy Siracusano: Then if I want Michelle, To touch type a response.

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Amy Siracusano: Using a keyboard, I want Michelle to be able to touch type 10 words per minute.

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Amy Siracusano: So that, that cognitive flow, that triangle, that volcano, doesn't erupt on her.

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Amy Siracusano: The other piece of guidance comes from a study done in 1999 with a group of special education children in middle school. And that study, with those groups of students, found that when those students touch-typed less than 20 words per minute, composition was impacted.

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Amy Siracusano: So, those are two pieces of guidance.

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Amy Siracusano: It's not set in stone, it's just something to pay attention to in terms of instruction.

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Amy Siracusano: So, research tells us we shouldn't skip over explicit handwriting instruction and just teach keyboarding. We want to teach both, because there are benefits for both, and exhaust all possible attempts at teaching handwriting instruction before considering electronic technology.

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Amy Siracusano: Okay.

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Amy Siracusano: So that was really quick on handwriting and keyboarding, and I'm gonna talk a little bit now about the importance of composition in terms of the sentence.

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Amy Siracusano: And like I said, these skills become increasingly strategic over time, and in order to do this work, just like what you have in your,

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Amy Siracusano: Linguistic comprehension lessons, your standards for language comprehension or linguistic comprehension, just like you have standards to guide you in word recognition, or decoding, or phonics, or spelling.

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Amy Siracusano: you have a scope and sequence based on your state standards. You need, we need, scopes and sequences for handwriting instruction, for keyboarding, for written composition, written expression. We need a scope and sequence to guide us.

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Amy Siracusano: And the sentence, like handwriting, is the building block for transcription. The sentence is the building block for composition.

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Amy Siracusano: So there's a progression to this, and I have grade levels at the top of my boxes, but please know those dashed lines are there very intentionally.

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Amy Siracusano: You guys.

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Amy Siracusano: we've got to start looking at this in terms of grades, and start looking at kids at where they are, and meeting them where they are, and giving them what they need, right? So, typically in the standards, this is where we find these things, but please know, we may have some third graders that need to work on things like a simple sentence.

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Amy Siracusano: Everything we do is built on oral language.

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Amy Siracusano: From the very beginning, when kids are in school, we've got to get kids asking and answering questions. We educators are doing too much of the work for the kids.

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Amy Siracusano: So we might put a picture on the wall and ask kids to ask a question, and then turn the question into a statement to respond to it using complete sentences. The more that we do that, the more that we're going to support this sentence-level development in written language over time.

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Amy Siracusano: The other thing that's gonna help is as our 3rd and 4th grade teachers are asking kids to respond to questions in text, kids will not start responses with fragments or words like because. They'll be able to learn how to turn a question into a statement, which a lot of our youngsters don't know how to do.

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Amy Siracusano: So, starting out, we want to start with a simple sentence, which is just means, it's a complete thought, with a subject and a predicate, capital letter, and an ending punctuation mark. We want to teach sentence expansion by the end of kindergarten.

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Amy Siracusano: First and second grade, we teach things like compound sentences and the four types of simple sentences.

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Amy Siracusano: Then moving into third grade and beyond, we continue this journey in building upon sentence expansion and rearranging with simple sentences, compound sentences, the four types of sentences with the three punctuation marks at the end, and we teach something called complex sentences.

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Amy Siracusano: So we start out with something like giving them a picture, explaining the flavors of the syrups, and we might say to the children in the class, what's your favorite flavor of ice cream?

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Amy Siracusano: I want students to respond, my favorite flavor of ice cream is, but in the beginning, they're going to give me the flavor only.

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Amy Siracusano: Or say all of them. It'll be a fragment. It won't be a complete thought. So I'm going to model these things for quite a bit of time until I get kids to be able to repeat after me and understand how to do this kind of connection between questions and statements, right?

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Amy Siracusano: And then I can move into thinking about

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Amy Siracusano: sentence activities that are supported by research, such as sentence expansion activities, sentence combining activities, sentence generating activities, with scaffolds and without scaffolds. There are tons of activities that are really useful, but these are the three that are most beneficial. So what might this look like?

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Amy Siracusano: I could start out with a bare bones or a kernel sentence.

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Amy Siracusano: And many of us use subject and predicate, and that's fine.

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Amy Siracusano: But, subject and predicate is a Tier 3 word. Kids are not talking about subject and predicate as terminology on the playground or at the lunch table. They're not doing it.

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Amy Siracusano: So why do we have to use such abstract terms in the beginning? Why can't we break it down a bit more concretely? Some of you might say the who or the what did what, the action. My colleague, my mentor, my friend, William Van Cleve, always told me to call it a doer and a do, and so I do that.

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Amy Siracusano: in getting kids to be able to identify the subject and predicate. It doesn't mean that I don't teach parts of speech or these grammatical terms, it just means that I make things as concrete as possible first for kids to understand the function of words and sentences.

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Amy Siracusano: And THEN…

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Amy Siracusano: I can slap those abstract labels on once they understand how words are functioning. So, dogs bark, doer and do, and then I'm gonna use question words

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Amy Siracusano: to give them a wardrobe to dress up this sentence, depending on the situation that I'm in, right? So, I could start with a question word like when, but for some students, when is even abstract, so we might have to say time.

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Amy Siracusano: Then I could say, where? But where might be too complicated for some kids to understand. And my SLP colleagues will say, Amy, you have to use terminology like a place, and giving them some examples of times and places.

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Amy Siracusano: But what we do is we say, oh, we're gonna learn about the setting today, the setting answers when and where, and we do this in reading, and then kids don't give us what we want.

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Amy Siracusano: So what if we did some of this work at the sentence level within text, and we said, oh, did the author tell us a time?

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Amy Siracusano: Or a place? Or a where, or a when? Oh, you guys, when we find those details in text, that's called the setting.

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Amy Siracusano: And we're gonna take a bare-bones sentence now, and we're gonna add a time and a place.

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Amy Siracusano: or a where and a when, and we're gonna write a sentence that tells the reader about a setting, right? So connecting these back to reading can be really, really powerful and support reading comprehension and writing acquisition as well.

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Amy Siracusano: So, there are lots of question words that we can build on slowly over time in getting kids to do sentence expansion, and then to be able to do sentence rearranging. So, dogs bark in the park. In the park, dogs bark. Dogs bark at night. At night, dogs bark, right? Teaching them how to rearrange these kinds of phrases.

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Amy Siracusano: And we want to do a lot of this work again before we do it in written language and oral language. So, beginning with 5-year-olds, we can teach prepositions. They don't need to know the terminology. They need to know the function.

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Amy Siracusano: Prepositions and prepositional phrases help us to explain where. They add more information, right? So I might start with a question. Where are the eggs?

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Amy Siracusano: And kids will say, under the hen, under the chicken, right? Things like that. I want a complete sentence. The eggs are under the hen, right? Repeat after me. Where is the cat?

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Amy Siracusano: the cat is in the box, right? So getting them to be able to do this inherently before I have them do some of this with things like sentence expansion.

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Amy Siracusano: Right? Oral language, building on that knowledge.

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Amy Siracusano: And then thinking about how we teach kids to combine words and phrases and clauses and sentences, right? So, in grades 1 and 2, we can teach things like conjunctions.

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Amy Siracusano: We have this specialized conjunction called the coordinating conjunction. Co means together, right? We have 7 coordinating conjunctions.

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Amy Siracusano: We remember them from the acronym FANBOYS. FANBOYS, these 7 coordinating conjunctions, can be used to join groups of words.

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Amy Siracusano: or phrases, or sentences, and these 7 little itty-bitty words are packed with meaning. But unless we start pointing it out in rich read-alouds, kids are going to struggle to use it in print.

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Amy Siracusano: Think about the ones that are more common in oral language. Those are the ones we would start out with first. AND, BUT, OR and SO.

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Amy Siracusano: for, nor in yet are not

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Amy Siracusano: Conjunctions that we typically use in oral language, all the time.

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Amy Siracusano: Right? Yet, maybe a little bit. But for and nor, not so much. We would need to see that in text to help kids to understand the meanings of these words, and how these words work together to join other words. And if you look at these words, this is the beginning of teaching kids text structure.

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Amy Siracusano: We're at the sentence level.

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Amy Siracusano: By joining ideas together, or groups of words together.

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Amy Siracusano: These coordinating conjunctions can also be used to join subjects, right? More than one subject, more than one doer in the sentence, or more than one do, more than one predicate in the sentence, right? Where we have more than one action.

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Amy Siracusano: Comma's in a list.

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Amy Siracusano: Right?

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Amy Siracusano: and compound sentences. Now, there is a difference between compound sentences and compound predicates, and the difference is, if I take away the comma and the conjunction, I have two independent standalone sentences.

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Amy Siracusano: If I took away the conjunction here, I don't have a sentence on the other side.

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Amy Siracusano: I have no subject here.

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Amy Siracusano: And there is no comma used in compound predicates. So, these are the things that our educators need to feel really comfortable with and knowledgeable with in order to be able to break this stuff down for kids.

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Amy Siracusano: And we can use manipulatives such as index cards and sentence strips to really help kids learn and understand how to join words together, how to expand sentences, how to move phrases or groups of words around until they understand and see how this is, this comes together, right? And I know there's a spelling mistake here on Saturday, but this was a group of first grade students that I worked with in Maui, and they did a

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Amy Siracusano: Beautiful job. The following day, I would come back and have them copy it in a notebook, and then I would talk to them about, you know, ER, IR, UR, and help them with spelling the word Saturday, and lean into that in instruction in my class.

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Amy Siracusano: After we're done with compound sentences, we have to teach complex sentences. This is not easy, because there's a lot of language that kids need to know in complex sentences. Dependent, independent clause, subordinating conjunction. When do I use a comma? When don't I use a comma?

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Amy Siracusano: And in doing this work, right, with lots of practice, we want to get kids to be able to generate sentences using these kinds of conjunctions, using, vocabulary.

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Amy Siracusano: And we want to make sure we scaffold this practice for kids, and give them enough intentional practice. Underlining parts of speech in worksheets, or finishing sentences in worksheets is not enough.

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Amy Siracusano: Because we're gonna wind up still seeing middle school and high school students writing like the student on the left here.

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Amy Siracusano: Versus a student who knows how to write a simple, then a compound, and a complex sentence, writing paragraphs more like this on the right.

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Amy Siracusano: But in order to be able to do this work.

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Amy Siracusano: We have to provide practice for kids with feedback. So we want to teach kids accurate practice.

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Amy Siracusano: With support! Oh, I forgot to capitalize the word I today. Okay, it's okay, we're gonna sit in this, practice accurately, with my feedback, practice accurately, with my feedback, until you get to the point where you can do this skill all by yourself.

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Amy Siracusano: And in order to do that, one of the things that we have to lean into is supporting things in executive functions, right? So what kinds of things do we have to support kids with checklists and goal setting and scaffolds, right? So… and just like kids, the first time that they learn how to use

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Amy Siracusano: Periods. In…

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Amy Siracusano: in kindergarten, they put them everywhere. Well, we get overzealous too, you guys, in our classrooms. We use… then we use checklists everywhere. Be intentional. Be like the Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Find the checklist that's just right for the child who needs it. So, things like…

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Amy Siracusano: You know, communicating with parents how handwriting is going for children, where are they falling apart? Where are they doing really well? A lot of good handwriting programs will come with checklists to identify who needs improvement, who's showing mastery, thinking about shape and size and slanting and spacing.

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Amy Siracusano: In terms of writing, I might have a 5th grader that needs a capitalizing checklist, and reminder to capitalize the word I, or spacing out words, or using end punctuation, or I might have kindergartners that are ready for something like this.

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Amy Siracusano: And when we think about scoring children, rather than using these dense,

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Amy Siracusano: rubrics that have tons of idea units. What if we take our standards, and we break our standards out into the different components? And when we do that, we notice, or I notice, especially in this second grade standard, that this standard says nothing.

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Amy Siracusano: In narrative writing about including an introduction or a beginning.

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Amy Siracusano: So where is that?

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Amy Siracusano: Well, that's something that I want to make sure my kids can do.

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Amy Siracusano: So in having a checklist where I take this very dense standard for narrative writing, and breaking it out into the different components, and thinking about, oh, when do we use temporal words, rather than forcing kids to use them? You know, do they need support? Have they showed consistency?

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Amy Siracusano: Consistency, to me, is mastery. We all make mistakes in writing.

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Amy Siracusano: We could do the same thing with our language standards in thinking through, capitalization and punctuation.

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Amy Siracusano: Right? Appropriate spelling.

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Amy Siracusano: To help, kind of, pinpoint what it is that we need to support them with.

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Amy Siracusano: These kinds of things can also pinpoint helping kids to goal set, set goals for themselves, right? So, providing things like sentence frames for students, and thinking about who needs what.

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Amy Siracusano: In terms of what particular writing?

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Amy Siracusano: And then finally, what kinds of tools are we using to support narrative and expository writing?

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Amy Siracusano: So, for young kids, we might need to start with sentence frames.

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Amy Siracusano: Rather than telling kids, add details to your writing, which, in my experience, kids write slower.

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Amy Siracusano: And neither, but they don't change anything.

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Amy Siracusano: Maybe I tell them exactly what I want them to do.

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Amy Siracusano: Add 3 describing words to the doer in the sentence. Add 3 adjectives, the nouns, once they have that language, so that they know exactly what I'm expecting them to do with a scaffold, so that they can be successful.

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Amy Siracusano: And then thinking about narrative text structure. We can use story mountains very early on to kind of think through mapping out what's going to happen at the beginning, middle, and end of my story.

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Amy Siracusano: How am I gonna feel at the beginning and the middle and the end of my story? That's my internal story.

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Amy Siracusano: And then, what about the setting? Does it change from the beginning and the middle and the end of the story?

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Amy Siracusano: For a first grader that learns how to use a story mountain like this early on, they can write a sentence, a sentence, a sentence.

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Amy Siracusano: Then I can ask them, oh, can you tell me where the story took place? How about the time of day? Right? And that's that sentence expansion. For third graders, maybe it's a paragraph, a paragraph, and a paragraph.

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Amy Siracusano: When we think about asking kids to do things with timelines, or sequence things, I used to do it along the bottom of the notebook, and their writing got lost in the lines. Somebody told me to draw a line down the margin, put all of the events or the sequence inside the margin, and have them use the lines to write the events to the right.

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Amy Siracusano: Kids need lines, they need borders, they need a starting and a stopping place. When we do compare and contrast with those ovals, kids' writing gets lost all the time in the center. So maybe use an organizer for compare and contrast, like Top Hat.

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Amy Siracusano: So there's a beginning margin and an ending margin. What's different? What's the same? Or rather than an oval, teach them how to draw rectangles. This is where stroke development in transcription is going to come into play.

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Amy Siracusano: So, in the final few minutes, because I want to leave some time for questions, in case anybody has them, I just want you to think, everything we do in literacy, we need a scope and sequence. And if you don't have a scope and sequence in writing, one of the places that I highly recommend you look is P-A-T-T-A-N, PATTEN, which is the Pennsylvania Technical Assistance Network.

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Amy Siracusano: If you just Google sample writing scope and sequence, you will find macro-level and micro-level skills, or transcription skills and composition skills, kind of outlined from K-12.

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Amy Siracusano: It's a guide. It's not the law. It's not how everything should be done, but it's something you could look at in comparison to your state standards. Ensure students are receiving explicit, systematic, intentional instruction with trained adults.

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Amy Siracusano: Ensure students receive enough practice to automatize skills. Not a 30- or a 40-minute language lesson. But think about doing your language lessons like we do math talks, 5 to 10 minutes a day.

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Amy Siracusano: And live a little bit longer in that language over time.

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Amy Siracusano: And then writing instruction should build from simple to complex, beginning with oral language development and handwriting.

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Amy Siracusano: So I hope this evening I've given you some food for thought about transcription and composition being separate skills.

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Amy Siracusano: Thinking about scoring tools and how they can pinpoint instruction, and then thinking through how to support executive functions.

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Amy Siracusano: I want to thank you for everything that you do. Please follow me on Instagram under my company name. I usually post some videos from time to time. I hope that I hear from you all, and I am going to turn it over to Carly for a moment, and say thank you.

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Karly O'Brien: No, thank you, Amy. This was wonderful. Lots of folks were engaged, and it makes me want to go right back into the classroom, and I honestly envy those of you that get to go try some of these things later this week, because…

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Karly O'Brien: I learned a lot, so I'm envy of you all that get to go do it… do it tomorrow, so. But Amy, there were two questions that came through, if… for those of you that would love to

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Karly O'Brien: still stick around, we have some, sure, you would love to share some thoughts around these topics as well. So, the first one is, and honestly, I can relate to this because I did this too. So, they said, I remember using songs that matched the motion of writing when I was a pre-service teacher. Does that kind of multi-sensory approach support handwriting development?

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Amy Siracusano: As long as it's not cognitively overloading, and it's supportive of the children in front of you, right? As long as it's not too much language. We want to be as succinct in what we're asking kids to do with directionality as possible. But if song behind it will help them, go for it. What I do know is air writing is more about engagement.

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Amy Siracusano: And there's no tie to activating the reading brain when we're air writing. Kids need to feel that feedback under their fingers or the pencil in order to be able to activate that reading brain. So, Dr. Berninger.

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Amy Siracusano: Always says, get pen to paper as soon as possible. So, yeah, as long as we're being succinct for kids. Less language is better. Yeah.

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Karly O'Brien: Yeah, great, thank you. And then, actually, another one came through, too. So there's one more around handwriting, and then there's one, shifting gears a little bit. So, the next one is, how much, if at all, does tracing letters help students move toward… move towards fluent, independent writing?

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Amy Siracusano: Yeah, so a lot of the good programs will use an approach called trace, copy, covered, closed. So the first thing that we start with is tracing the letters with an open space, then copying the letter with a model, and it could be a dash line or without it. Then you cover your model, and you do it from memory.

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Amy Siracusano: Right? That retrieval process, and then, you could do it with your eyes closed, and then match it to the model to see if you have it almost accurately. Once handwriting is automatized, you guys, it is a motor memory task in long-term memory, and it's a retrieval process, and you can do it with your eyes closed. So, trace, copy, covered, closed is a good approach.

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Karly O'Brien: I love that. I feel like there's so many, like, tracing workbooks out there, so it's interesting to… to know that there is research around what's actually working, so thanks for sharing. And then one… one last thing, shifting gears from handwriting, so the question is.

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Karly O'Brien: During read-alouds, when we are spending time focusing on syntax or sentence structure, should that be a separate lesson from the ones that are focused on comprehension?

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Amy Siracusano: Okay, say that one more time.

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Karly O'Brien: Sure, no problem.

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Karly O'Brien: During read-alouds, I can also copy and paste it in the chat.

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Amy Siracusano: Okay.

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Karly O'Brien: During read-alouds, when we're focusing on syntax and sentence structure, like you kind of modeled before, should that be a separate lesson from when we are focusing strictly on comprehension work?

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Amy Siracusano: Yeah, so you want to do writing sentence-level work during a writing time, about 5 to 10 minutes a day, and you want to make connections back to your read-alouds as well. So, you want to maybe draw it out in the read-aloud, and then do systematic explicit instruction in that development in your writing time, so that you're making that connection. It's similar to when you're teaching phonics.

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Amy Siracusano: or the alphabetic principle, and then you're tying it into the ability to read connected text. So, kind of marrying those two, but then giving that time explicitly for it separate.

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Karly O'Brien: That was gonna be kind of what I was going to say, after that, is there's so… there's so many, I feel like, curriculums and resources out there that do that with phonics during read-aloud, so I was wondering what your… your thoughts are with, when it comes to sentence structure as well. So it sounds, like, similar to… to the phonics approach as well, so…

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Amy Siracusano: Absolutely.

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Karly O'Brien: Awesome, thank you. Well, those were all the formal questions, so if nobody else has any other questions, I just want to say thank you all so much again for joining us. Just like Amy said, thank you for the work that you all are doing every day, and

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Karly O'Brien: We have two more webinars this year, so please feel free to, head to riff.org slash webinars and check out the remaining schedule. And then RIF also has a podcast now called Reading Inspires that Amy will be on down the road when she is

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Karly O'Brien: not so busy, hopefully. She's one of the most busy people I know in the world, so, we're excited to have her be a part of that as well, so be on the lookout for her episode in a couple of months. And, as always, if you need us, reach out, and if you need Amy, reach out as well. So thank you all so much, and Amy, thanks, it was such a pleasure. Can't wait to continue our partnership.

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Amy Siracusano: Thank you so much for having me, I appreciate you.

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Karly O'Brien: Of course! See you all soon. Have a great night. Bye-bye.