How “Slow Writing“ Helps Kids Write Fast

"Slow writing," an exercise dreamed up by British English teacher David Didau, has been circulating on teaching blogs over the last few months. 

Here’s how Didau himself describes it:

So "slow writing" isn't what you think it might be. It's not, at its core, about teaching children to take their time when writing, but rather helping children learn to plan ahead before they even start. The beauty of this idea is that it actually helps speed up what is often a laborious process for struggling writers. On their own, they will often either take hours to write a single paragraph, or resort to the path of least resistance: short, simple sentences that leave much to be desired!

But if you can explicitly guide them, rather than just asking them to be more creative on their own, then they themselves will be amazed at how quickly they can produce good work.

And then, with practice, they need the guidance less and less. At that point, the process of crafting interesting sentences becomes automatic for them.

This, of course, sounds strangely like the Guided Phonetic Reading technique we use in Easyread. Maybe that’s why I like the idea of “slow writing” so much…!

Read more at Didau’s blog, here.

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Sarah Forrest is a Reading Specialist for the Easyread System, an online tutoring service that uses innovative literacy techniques to help struggling learners with visual learning styles, dyslexia, auditory processing weakness and more. www.easyreadsystem.com