Tag Archives: writing

Writing Fairy Tales with Third Graders

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Rapunzel

Fairy Tales. What a cool form to explore with third graders. Magic. Good vs. Evil. A terrible problem that works out in the end. Right up the alley of 8 and 9 year olds who are more than willing to live in secondary worlds. I recently had the chance to open up the idea of writing fairy tales with a third grade class. The class was in the midst of writing various forms of short stories involving a classroom character that they had developed by the name of Kaitlyn Rose Anderson. The teacher wanted to challenge the students to write their own fairy tales involving Kaitlyn Rose, thus transferring what they know about the character into a completely new context – lots of potential for convergent and divergent thinking and writing to happen.

We started our exploration by doing a quick writing warm up: Make a list of names you’d like to be called. Here’s mine:

Frankenleif

The Stitler

Goose

Das Leifster

Foam

Nutty Nut

Longenfreugen

Nipsy

Stinky the Nudge

Partical Man

Pentagon

Limpy

Salty

Nimble Thimble

Of course, some students made a list of a names they don’t want to be called. Always good to break the rules in meaningful ways! Here are a few that made me pause:

Stupid

Unpopular

If that isn’t a window into where the third graders are right now, I don’t know what is!

After we wiggled our elbows for a good three or so minutes, I asked the students to pick their top three names off the list and to share those names with the person next to them. Laughter ensued along with many students saying how much they liked a name that was offered. We were definitely headed in the right direction. Our minds and hands were warmed up, and we had a good laugh. Once students shared their top three names, I mentioned how writers will often make lists of potential names for characters in their stories. I hinted that they may want to use some of these names in the story that we were going to write.

From there, we moved into exploring fairy tales specifically. I asked them what a fairy tale was, and with very little hesitation, hands raised. Through this conversation, we came up with a pretty sophisticated list of fairy tale characteristics.Characteristics of a Fairy Tale

I then asked them to come on over to the rug so that I could read them a fairy tale. They all scrambled over and we strategized together how to sit so that everyone could see – a classic challenge for young kids. Once folks were settled, I asked them to listen closely to the story to see if our list of characteristics stood up and to see if we needed to add anything to the list. I picked up Rumpelstiltskin by Paul O. Zelinsky, showed the front cover, read the acknowledgement, and began the story. The students loved it. I got the sense that several of them had never heard Rumpelstiltskin before. They pleaded with their classmates to not give up what happened next. They identified the king as a bad man but then wondered if the beautiful daughter would be able to change him over time. The room was mixed in terms of whether the daughter should marry the king. The students thought Rumpelstiltskin was pretty scary.

RumpelstiltskinWith a turn of the final page and a show of the back of the book, I then asked them if there was anything that we wanted to add to our list of fairy tale characteristics. The students identified two: The challenge or problem grows, and there is repetition. One student pointed out, “And the repetition can be things that characters say or do.” Good point. I added those two important qualities to the list.

I could tell that the students were itching to get started. Before we could jump to writing our own fairy tales, though, we needed to spend just a few minutes talking about this great classroom character that they had created. I wanted to make sure that she was in the front of their minds as they took on the challenge of writing their own fairy tale. We put the classroom character up on the smartboard, and I asked them to tell me a bit about Kaitlyn Rose Anderson. The students shared particular character traits that stuck out. They talked a bit about the stories that they had already written. I asked them to tell me the names of some of the other characters in those stories. The students mentioned Kaitlyn’s sister. I suggested that they may want to include these characters in the fairy tale. I also suggested that they may want to take a fairy tale that they know and write Kaitlyn into it. I posed the question: What would happen if Kaitlyn was in Rumpelstiltskin? There was a buzz. One student asked, “Can I write the next chapter of Rumpelstiltskin?” I nodded. Another student clapped her hands together, “Can I mash a bunch of fairy tales together and see what happens?” The class loved that idea. And with that, I sent them back to their writing tables.Kaitlyn Rose Anderson

Just before we got started, the teacher piped up, “What other fairy tales do we know?” The group came up with a long list. Fairy tales were definitely in their minds. They were ready to write.

I posed the challenge to them: write a fairy tale that involves Kaitlyn Rose Anderson as a main character in the story. Before I sent them off to their writing spaces, I mentioned that one of the great things about fairy tales is that they kind of supply the opening line for us, so we don’t need to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to start. I encouraged them to literally take the first line out of Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, or Kate and the Beanstalk, and see where the writing takes them.

Once there was a poor X who had a beautiful X.

Long ago, a girl named X lived with her mother in a X.

In a time not too long ago and in a land much like our own, there lived a X and a X.

Students were already scribbling away, so I stepped aside, got out my own pad of paper, and let them write.

At first there was a bit of chatter. Students were looking at each other’s writing, pointing out how to spell a word, asking a question, flipping through the pages of Rumpelstiltskin for inspiration or just to figure out how to spell the name. After a bit, I coached, “Let’s put all of that talking energy down on the paper. Work to answer your questions through the writing. See if you can fill a page.” The room quieted down, and you could practically feel the focus in the room.

About ten minutes in, I broke the silence, and suggested some ways to keep going: “If you are finding yourself thinking a lot instead of writing, take a look over here at our list of fairy tale characteristics.” I pointed to the list.  “They might give you some ideas on where to go next. For example, is your problem growing? Where is the repetition? Do you have a bad character? Another thing to do is to read what you have written. Just by doing that, you will probably find what needs to be written next.” I looked out over the group, “I also like how some of you are going back to your first story and reminding yourself of what you wrote. I can see how that might trigger an idea or two as well.” I clapped my hands, “Alright, back to it. Let’s see if we can write for another five minutes or so.” The students put their heads back down and went back to writing.

Writing Fairy TalesBefore we knew it, the time was up. I needed to leave, and the kids needed to go to lunch. On the way out, I touched base with the teacher, and the plan is to give them a chance to read what they had written so that they can immediately hear the possibility in the writing. Looking beyond that, the students will get a chance to choose one of three drafts of different stories involving Kaitlyn Rose Anderson that they will get the chance to revise, edit, and publish. Not a bad use of an hour of class time if you ask me!

Category: General Writing Ideas, Teaching, Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The Tenets of a Writing-Based Curriculum

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Alright, so we’ve got the new school year off to a good start. We’re setting the tone, getting to know our students, establishing rituals and routines for meaningful learning. It’s a perfect time to spend a few minutes and remind ourselves of what is at the heart of a meaningful ELA learning environment. Here is a quick guide to what makes a writing-based curriculum tick.

Artifact studyWhat fuels a Writing-Based Curriculum?

  • Identifying a goal/product/performance/culmination that you want to achieve with your students that is connected to the world outside the classroom
  • Figuring out all of the ways that you and your students can be writers to accomplish that end (writing reflectively, analytically, and creatively)
  • Modeling the writing life through the design of the unit and the way you think, talk, and act with your students.

What does the writing life look like in the classroom?

  • Catching thoughts, ideas, questions, solutions, passing fancies down on paper/screen to create a reservoir of potential writing material
  • Reading models to help you think and do your own writing
  • Discussing models to figure out the moves that make the writing work
  • Engaging in idea generating conversations to figure out what you might want to write
  • Writing….a lot!
  • Returning to a piece of writing to elaborate and craft it based on the understanding you’re developing around the moves that make writing strong
  • Sharing works in progress for feedback
  • Putting the writing out into the world for impact
  • Keeping all writing work to be able to access and use at a later date because the writing that happens in class should have multiple lives and serve multiple purposes

What are the kinds of writing that should be happening in a unit?Tzaras Hat

  • Reflective writing: thinking in writing about life and work; post product analysis; question posing; answer seeking
  • Analytic writing: writing about reading; reports; essays; criticism; speeches; technical; informational
  • Creative writing: stories, poems, plays, memoir, blogs, hybrid-texts

What are potential culminations?

  • Performances: plays, public readings, debates, websites, shows, live museums, installations, works of art
  • Publications: books, anthologies, individual pieces, newspaper editorials, letters to officials, websites, blogs
  • Actions: meetings with significant people (physically/virtually), rallies, service

The goal is to design writing environments that don’t look, sound, or feel like school in school. That is the irony. Any way that the writing environment can be connected to the lived practice of writing out in the world beyond the classroom means that there is a greater chance that enduring understandings will be developed and life-long reading, writing, and thinking skills will be enhanced.

The Role of Grading and Feedback in a Writing-Based Classroom

Canon EOS Digital CameraWhen we tune our classrooms to the habits of mind and body of writers, we need to interrogate traditional notions of grading. It quickly becomes obvious that we need to  increase the ways in which students get meaningful feedback on their work. Put simply, our job as teachers is not to use our mental and creative energy grading papers. Our job is to create ways for students to see the impact of their work at multiple stages in its development and to design ways to articulate to students the kind of quality work that is expected. This means being a sleuth of sorts, constantly looking at our students’ writing and finding examples of quality that we can show back to the class. These models of quality work provide a platform for developing a shared sense of what quality writing looks and sounds like. And, of course, this modeling of quality goes beyond writing. Students should understand what a quality discussion sounds like. We need to provide models of what a quality reflection looks like, for example. Basically, any form of work that is going to be expected needs to have models of quality so that students have a sense of the moves they need to make to produce something good. This doesn’t mean that the teacher needs to have these models ahead of time. Sometimes that is a good thing, but it can be just as powerful to pose the challenge of a particular kind of writing, let students take on the challenge, and then look for models of quality writing in the way they approached the challenge. A sense of quality writing is developed over time. It evolves as students practice. The notion that showing students “perfect” writing or other forms of work in the beginning of the process of learning something and expecting students’ understanding of what quality is to come from that initial example is a fallacy. An enduring sense of quality develops by continually looking at models of quality, developing a quality language around them, experimenting in the form of work, and comparing one’s own work to the model of quality. The process is cyclical, mindful, intentional, and ongoing. Focusing on the grading of work takes away from the time to explore what great work looks, sounds, and feels like with our students.

In a writing-based classroom, there are a few carefully chosen times when work is graded in the form of a summative assessment. Limiting grading to a few select products is important because it not only more closely mirrors the way we are evaluated in the “real” world, it is also a proactive way of addressing the ridiculous student loads that teachers have, particularly in middle and high school. In my work, I see a correlation between student load and a teacher resorting to pedagogical choices that are not in the best interest of the students or the teacher, not surprising since it feels easier to do what has been done before. But these uni-directional, static forms of evaluation are not faster or easier, really. And they define a teacher’s work in a narrow and limited way. The narrowness can be stultifying and ultimately contribute to burnout. Instead, a feedback stance, with intentional moments of grading that are both process and product oriented, expands a teacher’s role and perhaps more importantly expands who should be providing feedback on the work (teacher, students, self). This means that the burden of providing the feedback, and maybe even the grading, does not only rest on the shoulders of the teacher. It rests on the class as a whole. This orientation better prepares students for being able to interpret and apply feedback and more honestly assess their own work. It helps to avoid a fixed mindset and learned helplessness which are often the partner of excessive grading environments. In terms of the teacher, a feedback approach, opens up time to live the work alongside the students, making for a more collaborative, responsive, and spontaneous work relationship.

Education is very good at making things unnecessarily complicated. When it comes to designing writing environments with our students, we can keep it really simple. Answer this question: what does it look, sound, and feel like to be a writer out in the world? The answer to that question should guide everything that we do.

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What does it mean to be a writer? Ask a fourth grader

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What does it look like, sound like, and feel like to be a writer, reader, and thinker in the world? This is the overarching question that fuels teachers who design writing-based curriculum. They are constantly scheming and planning how they can design learning environments where students and teachers become many different kinds of writers over the course of the year. One of the rituals of the writing-based classroom is  to think critically about the writing work that has been done over the year as a way to process the work, deepen the learning, and set future writing goals. The questions that teachers ask their students are pretty simple:

What have you learned about being a writer?

What is your favorite piece and why?

What do you like about writing?

Bonus question: What do you want to get better at as a writer?

The way in which students reflect on these questions depends on their developmental level. Pre-K students talk about the questions as a group with the teacher writing down what she hears. 4th graders write down their own answers to the questions. Teachers collect the responses and use them to reflect themselves on the year and to plan for next.

As this school year quickly comes to a close, teachers and students are in the throes of this ritual, and I wanted to share a particular class of fourth grader’s responses to the questions. For me it shows what can happen when we design learning environments where students and teachers are living a writing life together, where they are writing reflectively, creatively, and analytically out in the real world. Specifically, what I love about these responses is both the sophisticated writerly-sense that the 4th graders have developed over the year and the sense of play that they connect to the act of writing. The responses are also a guide for how we should be designing writing environments if we want students to truly be engaged and to feel that writing is a part of who they are.

1. What do you like about writing?

  • exciting stories from my imagination
  • making up fun awesome stories and characters
  • I like the part where you are kind of just thinking what you’re going to do.
  • I like when I try to put my own self in the story
  • I like when I’m about ready to go to the next chapter but before that I may leave a little “Cliffhanger!”
  • I like to have a sharp pencil.
  • I like when the teacher gives us topics.
  • I like to write stories about fairies.
  • My favorite part of writing is the editing because I get to go back and reread my stories and make sure everything is the way I want it.
  • A fun activity you can do pretty much everywhere.
  • Writing gives you the chance to write down what you’re thinking or about what happened today.
  • Sometimes I like to think about a book that I want to read but hasn’t been written yet, and then write it myself.
  • I love writing fiction stories.
  • What I like about writing is that I can just be free. I can just express how I feel while I am writing.
  • I love that you can pick your characters and their personalities.
  • You can use your imagination to create someone else’s reality.
  • Writing is a new way to let out your emotions on paper

2. What have you learned about being a writer?

  • have fun
  • use your imagination
  • get creative and write about  what YOU want to write about
  • you need correct punctuation and uppercase letter
  • write about what you think you will like
  • all stories don’t have to be true – it can have talking bugs or whatever
  • you can always add people in it if you don’t have the people you want
  • Plan your story before you start writing
  • Don’t ever pick something you don’t like.  Don’t pick it just because your friend is doing it.
  • Write a story that fits your personality.
  • An author should remember the Steps of Writing: Peer conferencing, editing, revision
  • Don’t get frustrated if writing a story takes a long time.  Writing takes a long time.
  • Start with a good beginning.
  • Your book has to make at least a little sense.
  • Choose to write about something that you know a good amount about.
  • Be proud of what your wrote even if someone else does not like it.

3. What is your favorite piece and why?

  • Persuasive letter to Channel 10 – I had fun writing about it and used my imagination from my Robotics team
  • Friendship story – I worked hard on it and at the end it has this thing where it’s like a fable.  Some parts were funny and some were sad.
  • My Dress story because this is the first time I actually wanted to keep writing all day long.
  • I liked my Time Travel and Special Place stories. I like them because they are very different than any other story I wrote.
  • I like my story about my dad because I feel like I got all the details from when he was 10 to when he is 50.
  • My favorite was my time travel story because I put a lot of detail in it and big adventures. I felt that I had a really good connection with the story and the characters.
  • My animal story because it’s different than anything else I’ve written. This story did not have a happy ending which is different for me.
  • I am proud of Chloe’s Dress Visit because when I wrote this I felt like I was a professional author.

 

 

Category: Being a writer, General Writing Ideas, Teaching, Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: , , ,

What is a Writing-Based Curriculum?

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hillman students 2At the core of a writing-based curriculum is a learning environment where students (and teachers) are writing reflectively, creatively, and analytically together.

This writing practice positions students and teachers as readers, writers, and thinkers in the world.

This writing practice also creates a platform from which students and teachers can design projects with real-world implications. The writing is the work of the project. It is the engine from which products and performances are generated. The work of the class is framed around a question like: what are all of the ways we can write reflectively, creatively, and analytically to help us accomplish real world projects?

This means that writing reflectively, creatively, and analytically is the engine for any and all of the work happening within the class. There are no extraneous, peripheral forms of work. No worksheets. No quizzes. Very few, carefully chosen tests. The goal is to limit or eliminate busy work for the student and the teacher and instead to live a writing/reading life together.

Work for both the student and the teacher revolves around:

  • Sharing stages of a project or piece;

  • Providing feedback;

  • Discussing reading; post-product analysis;

  • Strategizing next steps;

  • Incisive mini-lessons that help to push a project or piece forward;

  • Guest-lectures;

  • Intentional fieldtrips;

  • Echoing skills and concepts that are being developed;

  • Spontaneous challenges that help to deepen the learning;

  • Practice in a skill that needs to be developed in order for the students to do an aspect of a project;

  • Conferencing with individuals and small groups.

All of this work is meant to embody the genuine habits of mind and body of writers out in the world and to avoid the dangers of schoolification.IMG_3487

A few thoughts on schoolification

Schoolification is when we take a real-world practice (e.g. writing), and we remove any of the real-worldness out of it. Here are some classic examples:

  • Having students come up with their thesis statement before giving them a chance to figure out what it is that they want to write about through actually writing

  • Making an assignment for writing a poem where most of the line is written for the student, and they just need to complete the line

  • Making students read a book that they don’t like

  • Limiting the writing of a paper to a rough draft and a final draft

  • Providing no time for feedback on in-process writing

  • Providing no feedback on writing before the piece is turned in

  • Making work ‘easy’ so that there is no conflict, no difficulty, no struggle

  • Designing work to only be graded by the teacher

  • Limiting reading to whatever is provided by the school (e.g. textbooks)

  • Having students memorize literary terms

Part of the purpose for a writing-based curriculum is to engage in the real world of work and learning. We want to attempt to make our classes fit seamlessly in that world. And since we are designing ELA classes, and writing should be at the center of ELA, we want to design experiences that position our students and ourselves as writers out in the world doing the real work of writers:

  • Reflecting in writing about their life and their work

  • Reading a heck of a lot and writing about that reading

  • Writing a lot! Everything from a fleeting thought to a fully fleshed-out piece

  • Collecting stuff that can be used as fuel for writing and projects (research on topics, images, other writing, lists, doodles, print material, etc.)

We know from the literature that is out there about the writing craft that writers engage in these four habits of mind and body: they reflect, they write about what they read, they write, and they collect. These four habits feed off of one another, making it possible for writers to create poems, short stories, essays, plays, speeches, etc.

As we developing writing-based curricula, we don’t want to limit our conception of who a writer is to the taken for granted examples: poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist. We should certainly be these kinds of writers in the classroom, but we should be a whole host of other kinds of writers as well:

  • Website developers

  • Novelists

  • Journalists

  • Bloggers

  • Tweeters

  • Editors

  • Hackers

  • Biographers

  • Folklorists

  • Sociologists

  • Memoirists

  • Orators

  • Debaters

  • Urban planners

  • Screenwriters

And in our classes, we need to design ways for these different kinds of writers to reflect, write about what they read, write, and collect in order to generate interesting forms of work in that particular genre.

Redefining the work of the teacher

When teaching revolves around designing learning environments where we are living a writing life with our students, our orientation to the work of teaching changes as well. Our focus in a writing-based curriculum is to create environments where our students and ourselves can be many of the kinds of writers that I list above. This means that we, as teachers, need to develop a sense of and be open to the kinds of work that these kinds of people do. We scour resources to tap into what makes these kinds of writers tick. We look for media that captures these different kinds of writers discussing their craft. We look for anything that can help us embody the practice with our students. We want to become these kinds of writers just as much as we want our students to do the same.

We then think creatively about how the classroom environment encourages these ways of working for ourselves and our students.  In a traditional ELA classroom, teachers grade papers. In a writing-based classroom, teachers focus on designing opportunities for students and themselves to share their work for feedback and then to publish that work out in the world. In a traditional ELA classroom, all of the students are doing the same thing at the same time. In a writing-based classroom students may be doing different things at the same time according to where they are in the project. In a traditional ELA classroom, the teacher is the primary source for feedback and evaluation. In a writing-based classroom, everyone is viewed as a resource for feedback. In a traditional ELA classroom, the only time something is shared is at the end of the process. In a writing-based classroom, work is shared in process to determine next steps and to gauge impact.  In a traditional ELA classroom, the language of learning is predetermined and given to the student. In a writing-based classroom, the language is co-constructed through the work.

In this kind of a classroom, the teacher removes him/herself from the center of the experience and instead becomes a co-reader, writer, and thinker with the students, bringing his/her own work into class for feedback. The teacher is involved in and is as invested in the project that the class is doing at the time. The success of the project is dependent upon the teacher in a fundamentally different way to a traditional ELA classroom. In a writing-based classroom, the teacher spends energy pushing the work outward in the world rather than inward into a grade.

IMG_3482In the next post, I’ll speak to skill development within a writing-based curriculum as well as provide some examples of writing-based curriculum in action.

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Writing Open Letters, Memoir, and Flash Fiction with Middle Schoolers

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Johanna classThere is an incredible 8th grade ELA team at a public, middle school near my university. Maria, Johanna, and Sam are dedicated teachers who work closely together and aren’t afraid to take risks to deepen the learning for their students and themselves. They are living a writing life with their students that meets the skill and conceptual goals of their district and the Common Core. This is the first year that they have put into practice a writing-based curriculum, and it is changing the culture of their classrooms and the quality of the work. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some of their students’ writing in Curved Lines On The Terrestrial Sphere, our online journal for student and teacher writing. The first issue focuses on the art of the Open Letter, Memoir, and Flash Fiction. The Open Letter is a wonderful literary conceit because it is never intended to be read by the person, place, thing, or idea to which it is being addressed while at the same time, the letter is open to all to read. This irony tends to diminish writing inhibitions and give license to students to reveal the sharp, witty, and fresh writers that they are. Memoir is the perfect genre to explore craft because the moves that writers make in memoir are often transparent and accessible to  young writers. It is also a slippery genre, meaning that the writer can play around with the sometimes subtle differences between truth and fact. Middle schoolers love t0 mess around with those kinds of distinctions. Finally, Flash Fiction is usually no more than 400 words. This concision pushes students to think strategically about what they put in and what they leave out. The form lends itself to mirroring life’s idiosyncrasies.

When the teachers submitted their students’ writing, I asked them to respond to a few questions regarding the work and how it is influencing them as teachers. They talk about developing a culture of risk-taking, the ease of differentiating within a writing-based curriculum, and how the deep practice of writing prepares their students for life. For this first issue, I include below their thoughts on what their students’ writing makes them think about.

What does your students’ writing make you think about?johanna 3

Looking over the student writing makes us think about the growth the kids have achieved not only in terms of skill but in terms of confidence. They were mired in self-doubt in September. For so many 8th graders, the idea of writing is fraught with fear, anxiety, and a certainty that they will do it “wrong.” In their early journal reflections, students offered sentiments such as: “I’m a terrible writer. I wish I could be better but I don’t know how to be.” Worse yet, some firmly closed the door on the idea of writing and declared, “Writing is for some people but not for me.” Now, though, we see writers who are skilled and confident, eager to delve into new writing challenges, to experiment, and to take bold risks. It really drives home the fact that literacy is tied to cognition and that as their writing/reading grows, so does their analytical and problem-solving skills.

It also excites us to reflect back on what worked really, really well and what didn’t work so well so that we can refine it for next year. With stunning clarity, we can see that any time we veered from the routines and rituals of our writing-based classrooms – whether because of interruptions, timing, or other extraneous factors – we were frustrated with the results. This provides us with great reassurance and comfort that this path is the right path to journey with our students.

Submit your students’ or your own writing to CLOATS

If you are interested in submitting some of your students’ writing, or your own, please send it to Leif Gustavson at gustavson@arcadia.edu. I will be happy to include it in future issues. Please also leave a comment about the writing. We’re interested in hearing your thoughts.

Go to Curved Lines On A Terrestrial Sphere to read the first issue!

johanna 2For other great examples of open letters go to McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies

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Warping the Traditional Author’s Note

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A great ending to writing a piece is crafting a clever author’s note to go along with it. I tend to have my students write these whenever they are going to publish a piece of their writing. Author’s notes can sometimes be rather dull and formulaic, but there are some interesting and fun ways to write author’s notes that students enjoy and that push them to be strategic and artful with their writing. Here are a few ways to write author’s notes.

Idea # 1: Author’s Note as Cento

The Cento is a form of poetry where the writer pulls lines and phrases from other poems and puts them together to create a new poem. Have your students do this with their own writing! Have them go in and pull great lines and surprising phrases and have them think strategically about how they may want to put them together in the form of a wild author’s note. When you do this, you get something like this:

Delight I invoke, Run down, between ocean and gorge to myriads of transcendence in the star-flash of the underbellies of blue cars and other worlds that float off like foam Into the sea.

Or this:

Girl in water

bottle section(better

suited for light

around the edges)

developing a tendency

 to make the

unbearable tedium of

 regular writing. As

specified in Tour

Guide, this is

her second workshop.

An equation for

this exists: 15 + 240 =

this girl(me) at

Cliveden. The figures

change from year to year.

These two Centos were built out of lines and phrases that the students pulled from the stories that they had been writing over the course of a short story unit.

Idea #2: Author’s Note as Remix

Another way to create an interesting author’s note is to dig through the writing and find quirky and funny things that it says about the writer. Remix that material into an author’s note, like this:

Leah is someone with no rhythm. She hates Remax commercials. She has never traveled to Missouri and wishes never to go there…EVER. She likes jet planes, especially when flying to Europe (where, I forgot to mention, she also has never lived). She has heard the “then there was light” story too many times to count, but wonders when there was water. Maybe her next novel will analyze that. Leah did not write “The History of Anonymity.” She has, however, written the defunct book, “Swimming for Dummies.” She is furious that the publishers did not consider it. She currently has “writers not,” a mentality similar to “writers block.” We hope (or do not hope) to see her work again soon.

Or something like this:

Nick feels like croaking on in the morning on the way to school. His mother tries to play the Dixie Chicks and roll down the window. This makes Nick’s eyes go cross.

Good author’s notes can be short and sweet.

Idea #3: Author’s Note as Collaborative Writing

Get students and teachers together in groups of three or so and have them build author’s notes for each other collaboratively. Each writer gets out a piece of paper. Make the constraint three words and pass, meaning that each writer puts down three words and then passes the paper to the next writer. That writer picks up the author’s note from where it left off. Keep passing the papers around, writing three words at a time until you get something like this:

Eli envies the deaf, wears chucks, and hates Axe body spray. Currently he is adrift in a jar, buried under a rock, with the glass painted black. He’d love to talk about his family dynamic, but thinks it might be a bit of a personal subject at this juncture.

Or this:

This long wage of vast palette, which builds its range by adoption of hues in Tijuana of futuristic squirrels. Holy hell’s bells avenge Baltic buffoons. Eyes like saucers let me go! Tattooed tramp! My Mom’s got nothing but leaky boots.

Idea #4: Author’s Note as Identity Theft

Have your students go online and Google themselves. Have them jot down all kinds of interesting things that they learn about people that have their same name. Then have them write an author’s note using all of that information. You’ll get something like this:

Leif Gustavson sometimes lives in Massachusetts. He actively uses his Dropbox to collect electronic music under the artistic name Leify-Greenz. When not in Massachusetts, he returns to Kyle, Saskatchewan. While pursuing his Master’s Thesis in Cognitive Science, he won the Children’s Wish Foundation Home Lottery and secretly wished that his first name was Thor.  He has a propensity to take pictures with his shirt off. Leif often eats lunch at a shelter set up by the Spencer Emergency Management Agency at Knox Trail Junior High School.

The point of all of these forms is to warp the conventional author’s note, to push students to think and act divergently and convergently about the form. I would start this experiment by sharing a traditional author’s note or two with the students. Talk about the craft: what makes them tick? What are the moves that the writer is making in them? Then I would say, “For our author’s note, let’s warp the form a bit” and share these other ways of creating interesting, artful author’s notes. This way, they get the conventions of a traditional author’s note and then can twist it in fun and challenging ways.

All of the examples, with the exception of the identity theft one, are real author’s notes crafted by middle and high school students.

 

Category: General Writing Ideas | Tags: , , ,

Writing Night Poems with First Graders

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boston night

 

Heading into another first grade class tomorrow, and we are going to write poems about night. They have been exploring everything having to do with night, so the teacher and I thought writing poems about night would be a good way for them to get down in a creative form the different things that they have been learning. Here’s how we decided to set it up:

Writing Night Poems

First Grade

Objective: For the students to articulate their vision of night in the form of a picture and in the form of a poem.

Skills: translating image in head to paper; using specific and concrete language; using five senses in writing; interpreting a peers picture into poetrynight drawings16 copy

  1. Start by looking at a drawing or two of Night. I found some cool ones online.
  2. Talk about what we see and as the students talk, write what they say on the board, creating a spontaneous poem. (Teacher will do this)
  3. Have the students draw what they think night looks like. We draw with them!
  4. Students pass their drawings to someone else in class,
  5. Read a poem about night (see below)
  6. Talk about the moves that the poem makes in the poem. Come up with some great night words. Write on board
  7. Students then write what they see in their friend’s drawing, creating another, self-written night poem that is inspired by their friend’s drawing.Teachers write too!
  8. Share

This will probably take more than one period, but I think we can get the project up and running and then the teacher can take over and lead it to its conclusion.

Materials needed:
Working smart board to project pictures
Big white board to make the collaborative poem about night
Big sheets of paper and pencils, pens, and crayons for the kid’s drawings of night
Paper to write their own poems about the pictures

ashcan night

Poem to read Thanks to Larry Fagin!

in the night I sleep like a pig.

in the night I dream the pig goes to heaven.

in the night I see stars twinkling in the window.

in the night the moon is spinning like a crystal ball.

in the night my pajamas glow in the dark.

in the night the darkness glows like the inside of a cave.

in the night the breeze blows hard on my silent pajamas.

in the night the ghost of the living dead smiles at my baby doll.

in the night all my dolls wave at the ghosts.

in the night I dream of living crickets who crawl inside my pajamas.

in the night my shy little baby sleeps his head off.

in the night owls hoot to the glaring sky.

in the night pickles whisper to 7-Up.

in the night my heart beats slowly and quietly like the only muscle I have.

in the night soft jazz plays into the windy darkness.

in the night fog clouds up the land.

in the night the river sleeps and dreams about the magic flounder.

in the night the kingfisher grounds me for nothing.

in the night the little mermaid shakes her tail and finds her prince.

in the night the clothes in the hamper are exhausted.

in the night time does not sleep.

in the night the closet silently opens.

in the night I lie awake thinking about Fred.

in the night my butler wakes me for a joke.

in the night the janitor gently sweeps the school.

in the night Mrs. Dixon heats up the milk for the baby.

Category: Writing poetry | Tags: , , ,
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