How Elementary Teachers Can Develop a Daily Writing Practice With Students

Many teachers can be hesitant to teach writing because they don’t feel comfortable as writers themselves. In my own writing life and in my work with teachers, I’ve noticed a consistent pattern: The part of writing that feels hardest for both adults and students is generating ideas. Sitting in front of a blank page can feel daunting when you don’t yet have a reliable way to begin.

What’s often missed in conversations about writing is that ideas don’t come from thin air. Great writers are also great readers and listeners. They notice. They collect ideas from books, conversations, media, and lived experiences long before they ever sit down to draft. When teachers establish their own writing practices and make those practices visible, writing becomes calmer and more manageable for them and for their students. The same routines that help adults generate ideas can be modeled and adapted to help students do the same.

A Simple Routine That Keeps Writing Alive

To sustain a writing life, teachers need a reliable way to generate ideas before they ever sit down to draft. Beginning with ideas inspired by reading, listening, and noticing creates momentum, reduces the pressure of the blank page, and gives teachers a process they can later model explicitly for students.

Almost daily, I listen to a variety of podcasts and begin with the print version of a book before diving into the audiobook, moving back and forth between formats as needed. I tend to gravitate toward education, leadership, and narrative nonfiction, especially work that explores teaching, learning, and the human side of growth. I also read fiction for the way stories surface life themes like belonging, resilience, and identity, and I intentionally listen and read outside of education to stretch my thinking and strengthen the ideas I bring back to my work and my life.

Audio allows me to listen and multitask while moving through my day. Print allows me to slow down, revisit ideas, and pull quotes that resonate.

If I’m listening to a podcast that includes a transcript, I return to it later and reread what stood out to me. Often, I notice new ideas the second time through, ideas I missed when I was just listening.

As ideas emerge, I put them in the notes section of my smartphone so I can return to them easily throughout the day. Each note is intentionally labeled so I can locate and build on ideas over time.

Connecting Ideas to Lived Experiences

Writing becomes more sustainable when teachers connect ideas to their lived experiences, both in and beyond school. In my writing, I often return to the books and podcasts that sparked my thinking, pulling in quotes that help anchor my reflections and connect lived moments to larger ideas. Over time, this collection of posts becomes a record of my learning, a place where I can revisit ideas, notice patterns, and reflect on how my thinking has evolved. I pay attention to what’s happening in my work, my leadership, my teaching, and my personal life, and I connect those moments to research and ideas to explore what they mean for education in practice.

Over time, I’ve noticed a pattern. My writing often blends the following:

• What I’m thinking about in teaching, learning, and leadership
• What I’m learning from others
• What I’m noticing in the moment

That combination helps me generate ideas and share my learning in a way that feels authentic and sustainable.

As I return to my ideas, I pause and ask myself a few simple questions:

• What patterns are emerging?
• How do these ideas connect to my experiences?
• What might help a reader see themselves in the story?

When it’s time to write each week, I make intentional space to return to my ideas. I write weekly, but I’m also writing in small ways throughout the day. Certain moments make me pause and later become stories I want to understand more deeply and eventually shape into a blog post. As I revisit those notes, they often transform into articles as I’m inspired to write about a digital tool that might elevate instruction or reduce planning load, a professional learning experience or protocol that helps bridge theory and practice, or an idea sparked by listening outside of education that sharpens how I see teaching and what I’m able to bring back to it.

What Idea Collection Can Look Like in Upper Elementary

Writing doesn’t begin with a blank page. It begins with living, noticing, listening, and collecting. Idea generation must be explicitly taught, modeled, and normalized to students.

Ask your students to keep running lists of things they notice; questions they are wondering about; moments that stay with them; or ideas sparked by reading, listening, conversations with friends, media, or podcasts used in class. These collections give students a place to hold their thinking before they are ready to draft.

Model your own idea-collecting process. Show students where you keep ideas. Share a messy list. Let them see that ideas don’t arrive fully formed. In grades 3–5, this might look like keeping a visible writer’s notebook or a digital idea list that grows over time.

Create shared spaces for ideas. Idea notebooks, seed lists, classroom charts, or shared digital documents can become places where ideas live before writing begins. These spaces help students see that ideas are collected over days and weeks, not in a single sitting.

Invite students to listen, read, and observe. Pair writing with short read-alouds, shared texts, or classroom conversations so that students have something to think about before they write. Invite students to jot down a line that surprised them, a question they’re wondering about, or a connection they noticed to their own lives. Later that week, students can return to those same jots and add a new thought or connection, seeing how ideas grow over time. Writing grows from thinking, and students benefit from seeing how ideas emerge from what they read, hear, and notice.

Normalize returning to ideas. Teach students that writers reread, revisit, and rethink. In grades 3–5, this might mean returning to an idea list at the start of each writing session and choosing something familiar rather than starting from scratch. As students revisit their collections, teachers might invite them to notice which ideas keep resurfacing, how those ideas connect to their own lives, and which moments feel worth exploring further.

Build calm into the process. When students know they don’t have to come up with something “perfect” right away, confidence begins to grow.

In upper elementary, idea generation does not result in finished writing for a specific piece right away. Teachers can expect students to produce lists of possible topics, brief jots, labeled sketches, questions, or moments they want to explore further. These early artifacts are evidence of thinking, not finished pieces.

Writing is a discipline built through small, intentional habits. When teachers feel calm, capable, and confident in their own writing lives, they create the conditions for students to feel the same. And when writing becomes a shared journey rather than a solitary struggle, both teachers and students begin to see themselves not just as writers, but as people with something worth saying.