Thanks for coming to LikeToWrite.com. I'm Karen Haag, a teacher and student of the best ways to help children write well.

On this site, I offer ideas to teach writing and coach students to love writing and live the writer's life. I share what I learned from teaching writing in North Carolina for just about 3 decades. I post my discoveries in hopes that I help teachers, parents and students be effective writers who LikeToWrite.

I'm a writing and reading coach in North Carolina so I get to work with all grades, mostly K-8. I've found that whenever I walk into a kindergarten class and ask, how many of you are writers, all students raise their hands proudly. But by fourth grade, only a few admit to enjoy writing. As I counsel concerned parents and teachers, I often begin by asking, "Do you like to write?" Most tell me, "No." Add to that state mandares that few adults and students understand, yet by which students and teachers' futures are measured, and we have a formula for dislike and fear.

I started believing that writers could pass any writing test when I ran into a friend at a conference. As I shared my complaints, she waved her hand and dismissed my comments. "Oh, that test. Anybody can pass that." I thought about what she said for months. She was the FIRST person to ever tell me that. So, she got me to thinking. If she had no trouble, why did I?

Change in my attitude

It was my attitude. I didn't believe I could teach children to pass tests AND have the writing energy I loved. So, I changed my mind and started on a different course. I researched the teaching of writing, collected videotaped interviews of successful, student writers, and shared lesson plans with teachers. I collected writing samples to use in my lessons and created a file of classroom-tested lesson plans that got results. I shared with my teachers by demonstrating how to teach writing and confer with their children.

I listened to teachers and brainstormed solutions to their challenges: students who didn't like to write, students with writing disabilities, schedules where writing time had been crowded out, writing programs mandated by districts. We redid the schedule, laid out timelines, implemented daybooks, and meshed North Carolina writing-test requirements with countywide mandated programs. Test scores went way up! Basically, we got students (and teachers) writing! When students saw themselves as writers and wrote about what they knew, then teaching them how to pass tests was easy.

Change in my students' attitudes

What made me proudest was kids carrying writers notebooks with them from class to class and from school to home and back again. When I walked into classrooms, students rushed up to show me their latest entries. Every year, a hundred students entered our Young Authors Contest and teachers posted a Writers Wall of Fame in our foyer. Parents crowded the cafeteria for a Young Authors Coffeehouse. On Fridays, students at my school shared writing tips on a closed-circuit show called "Kids Teach Kids To Write." We built a community of writers where students and teachers LikeToWrite.

Now, I am a resident coach. I travel from school to school to share what I've learned with you - teachers who know that students love to write and that the tests thrown at us are just one measure of what our students can do.

ABOUT KAREN