Chapter 3: Share Your Writing Life
• Write together as a staff
• Note your writing practices
• Tell students why you write
Chapter Two of Regie’s book segues right into her third chapter, “Share Your Writing Life.” In this chapter Regie drives home the importance of teachers sharing their writing process with their students. She encourages teachers to become writers in front of their students, on their own and with their staff, and also to share their daily writing practices with their students. The purpose of the assignment below (Assignment #3) is to get you writing.
ASSIGNMENT THREE: Sharing Your Writing Life!
For many of us, writing is not enjoyable and/or is very difficult. Perhaps it is because we ourselves were never celebrated as writers. Or perhaps we only remember the “skills” based comments written in various colored pens on our papers…that always sliced deep (and turned many of us into “non-writers.”) These comments never really helped our writing become any better. As a requirement of a summer writing institute (which I was conned into attending “so that I could become a better teacher of writing”) I (Jackie) bit the bullet and wrote extensively throughout the course. What they say is true: the more I wrote, the more I enjoyed it, and I believe I grew as a writer. The goal of this two-part assignment is to get you writing.
Part One:
For the first part of this assignment you need to think about topics for your own writing (ideas/stories that you can share to excite your students) and then actually write a short piece (ideally in front of your students.) If you do not presently have the opportunity to write in front of your students then please complete the activity on your own.
1. Use the topic idea list from Regie’s “Try It and Apply It” on page 26. Choose several topics, and then create a list of sub-topics for each.
2. Choose the sub-topic that most interests you and write a short piece that you can use to model writing in front of your students.
Part Two:
1. On pages 45-46, Regie gives suggestions for writing exercises for the start of school (or really anytime you need to get writing started.) Follow her criteria for “Capturing A Moment” (from the summer or any other time ) and draft a short piece. Follow the directions in the chart on page 46.
2. After completing the draft, which should take no more than 10 minutes, take a moment to write down some of your observations of your writing process. Again, use the suggestions from the chart or the bullets below:
o What are you thinking about as you are composing?
o What exactly did you do to plan, to get started writing, when you got stuck, or when you completed your piece?
o What does your process look like? Do you write straight through? Stop to re-read? Revise as you go? Look up information? Edit?
The goal of this activity is to get you to write - which will hopefully get you more comfortable writing in front of your children! Complete this activity and let us know how it went by sharing your answers to some of the bulleted questions above.
Please post your comments to the course blog. (We don’t need to see your writing piece. We are more interested in your thought process as you completed the exercise.)
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Essentials of Writing Assignment 3
ReplyDeleteIrene Osterman Sussman
July 21, 2015
One of the subtopics I chose for the “Capture a Moment” was an experience swimming with my husband in the Nigerian Sea. To get started, I looked through my list of subtopics and actually started two different ones and then changed my mind. This experience was so phenomenal to me that I was driven to write about it and everything else seemed more like completing as assignment than actually capturing a moment. (Aha! Children should write about what excites them! )
While I’m writing I notice I am recreating the experience. I’m remembering all of the aspects of it that I enjoyed; the sights, the sounds, my husband, the feeling of the air and water. To that end, I spent too many sentences on what happened before we actually went swimming, (our hike to the beach). This is fine for my own writing but it wouldn’t be good modeling for first grader. Regie said we should model about what we expect our students to do and in the beginning of the year first graders are in the process of getting up to two or three sentences!
As I’m writing I’m also thinking a lot about my audience. This was perhaps the most challenging as I was practicing a writing piece that I would model with first grade but I was inspired to write a piece for adults. I kept checking my word choice, sentence length and even what I put in the piece. I really wanted them to be interested in what I had to say and also to relate to it. I found myself deleting many reflections that adults would enjoy more than children.
One of the most challenging parts of the piece was the ending. I wanted to go on and on about how I felt but I found the more I wrote the less the piece flowed. It took me awhile to find right point to end, hopefully leaving the audience with a feeling of my experience without giving away too much as this is a capture a moment piece, not a story about my whole day. I think this will be very important as I’m modeling for first graders. To show myself struggling to find a good ending may help them resist the lure of “and” “and” “and” in their stories.
I also struggle with NOT recreating everything in the stories! I am not sure how to balance really describing things and writing something the kids can realistically learn from.
DeleteI tried to keep my students in mind as I wrote, but it was hard since they weren't really here. I DID consider words they would like and things they would think were funny.
Endings are ALWAYS hard. I never feel like I have a bank of endings, either. I want to have about 5 ways they can "end" something, and have it posted really obviously in the classroom...but that seems SO overwhelming because some of the endings are for older kids..ugh! I feel like I'm too much of a perfectionist sometimes (and others not at all) :)
I actually LOVE to write in front of my students – they get a huge kick out of it. I have done similar things to the Try it, Apply it, so going through this again felt familiar. However, I tried to follow one piece of advice – keep it at the kid’s level. I have always written a bit above so they get the “story” part of the writing. As I read this part of the text, I see the importance of writing as I would want a child at that grade level to write. I also found the list with subtopics to be helpful. Sometimes I have to really think about what I want to write, and it was helpful to have a list. I have a section in my writing journals for ideas to write about. I could see the kids putting the sticky note in their writing journal, in the section for ideas, in case they wanted to write about another idea on that list. I very much consider myself a writer, and love to write on my own. However, writing in front of a group of kids is SO different. I always thought that I needed to have things thought out fully before I wrote. I loved the “permission” to struggle. I see how it would completely help kids to be less stressed out about writing!
ReplyDeleteI chose to write about swimming in a creek this summer. I started off thinking about the high points. I thought about what the importance of this story was (it was to be brave and try new things – the water was COLD)! I then thought about the things we did. We had to climb down an embankment, we had to test the water, I had to choose whether to jump in or ease myself in, and I had to choose how to end it. I had a hard time keeping it to the minimum because I wanted to make it a story that kids would laugh at, but I tried to keep it to a minimum, knowing that a second grader would need to be able to write something similar. I ended up writing straight through. I re-read through it, but didn’t make a lot of changes because I knew I wasn’t publishing it. I changed a word I had mis-spelled. I didn’t really need to look anything up because I chose to write a story from personal memory.
I think that this type of writing feels easiest for me to share. I struggle more with writing informational pieces with the kids because I usually need to go over that a bit more carefully and usually need to go back and forth between some sort of research.
More than anything, I loved that it was stated it was ok to make mistakes, and it even helps the kids!
Endings are hard. You can check out this website http://www.ttms.org/
ReplyDeleteAnd look at their writing teacher's strategy guide. Types of endings start on page 90. You may be able to pick and choose ones that you want to share with your students and find text examples to read to the class.
You could also Google types of story endings and get a ton of ideas to pick from (even lists for adult writers could be adapted for our level.)
I agree, showing students that we struggle, erase, cross-out and rework pieces is important. Students often think we just write and are done on the first try. Even up to high school, students resist revising and editing pieces. Helping them get in the mindset of considering their audience should help them be more willing to revise.
Page 16, in the above guide, has a sheet I like for generating topic ideas. As you mentioned, having a list of ideas and topics helps writers get started.
Students love to hear our stories. I think both your classes would love to hear about these swimming adventures.
Part 1:
ReplyDeleteI completed this assignment this summer while working 1:1 with a student. We had been talking about some different things we had done this summer so I decided to write about that with her. My topic had been summer memories, and my sub topics were BBQ with my family, hiking with a friend, my sister having a baby, and going berry picking. I chose going berry picking to write about:
Saturday was my nephew’s first time berry picking. I wasn’t really sure if he would like it at first, but he grabbed a bucket and started picking the blackberries with the rest of the family. I had to help him a lot to reach the berries and to pick the ones that were ripe. Then he started to eat the berries and he had berry juice all over his face! When we got home we made jam with the berries that we picked. My nephew ate the jam by the spoonful. Berry picking was definitely a success.
Part 2:
Looking down, I was scared and didn’t want to jump. I could hear my husband cheering for me from the shore below, but I was shaking from fear. I took a deep breath and knew that this was one of my only chances to jump into Crater Lake. I took a step back then ran forward, jumping off the tall rock. I closed my eyes and plugged my nose as I dropped into the icy water. As I swam towards the shore I could hear my husband laughing and I couldn’t help but smile. We were finally able to cross one more thing off of our bucket list.
Observations about my process: I realized that for my planning it helped to go back to that moment in time and really think about what I was feeling, what I was seeing, and what I was hearing. It helped to reread frequently as I wrote so that I could stay on topic and add/delete some information to help the story make more sense. I found that this is not how I expect my students to write at all. I usually write some, reread, edit and change as I go, where I usually teach my students to do their writing in pieces - write the whole rough draft, then edit, then finish it. I think this process was really helpful for me to examine my own writing and the way that I write so that I can let students have some of those same expectations.
Excellent Tara. This is why we wanted to have this assignment. So we can really step into our students shoes and see how we write.
ReplyDelete