RACE Writing Strategy (Is It Still Helpful For Students?)
You may think that the RACE writing strategy is a bit old-fashioned and doesn’t work well. What if we told you that it is still helpful for students to organize their thinking and writing?
Students follow a roadmap, which includes steps such as citing text evidence and answering a prompt. As a result, they learn essential writing skills that help them write short responses, paragraphs, and even longer compositions.
What Does Race Stand For in Writing
RACE is an acronym for writing strategy that helps the students gather their thoughts and develop clear answers to queries.
R= Restate the question
A= Answer it
C= Citing the evidence
E= Explain how the answer has proved your answer
Some teachers also call it the RACES strategy, where “S” stands for summarizing. Overall, it is a simple technique to help students write well-structured responses to a question.
What is the Race Writing Strategy
Don’t puzzle yourself with what is the race strategy in writing. It is simply a technique teachers use to teach students how to respond to a question. There are other writing strategies as well but RACE is considered more effective for grade 1 to grade 5 kids.
The one factor that differentiates it from other strategies is that it helps the students learn to cite evidence to support the answer.
Race Strategy Writing Examples
We collected a mix of examples from the author’s written example to grade1 and 5 students.
Race Example 1
The question is, “Why do you need a cellphone?” Everyone knows that it is essential. Let’s see how the author uses the RACE writing strategy to answer this question.
RACE Example 2
The teacher asked a student from grade 1 to write about Peter’s chair, and we were surprised to see that he attempted it very well using RACE strategy writing. This student has done an excellent job of restating and answering.
RACE Example 3
Here is another student from grade 5 who attempted a question using the RACE writing strategy. The writing is a bit hard to read, but we love how he tackles the answer using text citations. This kid writer deserves to be appreciated as he wrote the response independently and effectively.
Undoubtedly, race strategy is an effective technique to boost student writing skills. But besides that, you can also count on 3rd grade writing prompts to help kids with excellent write-ups.
Tips to Teach Kids With RACE Writing Strategy
To teach kids with RACE strategy writing, many teachers follow different techniques. Here are some tips and techniques to teach the kids the Race strategy for writing text evidence.
- Use the I Do, We Do, You Do method, which means first practice yourself in front of kids, then ask them to practice in the bunch, and finally assign individually.
- Create an anchor chart on the whiteboard where you provide brief information about each section, then ask kids to complete the sections.
- Provide sentence starters for each section of the RACE acronym, like
- For citing (In the text, The author says, study show that)
- For explain section (This means, It clearly shows, This evidence shows, e.t.c)
We hope the above information is enough to understand what is the race writing strategy and how to teach it to the students. But if any query is left in your mind, feel free to get expert essay writers help. They will help you to make a plan to teach your kids about Race writing strategy.
