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Show! Don't tell!

2/28/2016

"Show the readers everything, tell them nothing." - Ernest Hemingway. These are wise words that writers live by. I propose that they become wise words that writing teachers live by as well.

But first I would make a few changes....Show them how to do the writing, every bit of it. Simply tell them what to do - never!

When I began this work, writing a graphic narrative unit of study for first graders, I was brainstorming with a stakeholder. And one of the talking points during our discussion was making sure that the students watched me, the teacher, create the art during our lessons in a very genuine, transparent way. Um, in other words, it's okay if you draw like a first grader. So do your students! You will be making the art accessible to them if they see that your work is as simple and as imperfect as their own. In fact, the less developed you are as an artist, the better!

What?! (Now, he did not really say those words, but the implication was that there was real power in the fact that I would be modeling the work at the same level of expertise as my students. Hmmm...)

While I could accept that premise intellectually, as a teacher I struggled with the idea of modeling anything less than what would meet my own expectations. Does that make sense? In other words, I could handle drawing something primitive and simple. But could I handle drawing something "bad"?? Because, let's face it, I am no artist! I have never been worried about writing in front of students; but the thought of drawing in front of them had (and still has) me somewhat unnerved.

I believe this is the same thinking that has many writing teachers nervous about composing in front of their students. When you are the teacher, you are used to being in control. Writing in front of any group, even kindergartners, can make you feel vulnerable. The process of writing anything at all is complicated. And trying to manage that creative process with upwards of twenty-five pairs of eyes staring at you is intimidating. Change those kindergartners to third-, fourth-, or fifth-graders and you just know they are judging your work. (They're not, but it certainly feels that way!)

This week in my first grade classrooms, I realized with sudden clarity that we were going to need to move away from our mentor text, Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons, by Agnes Rosentstiehl, and begin to rely more on my own modeled drawings using our class story. Mostly that is because the theme of our graphic narratives is one of motion and positive change. Our mentor text is more one-dimensional. In order to successfully compose a narrative with such a dynamic story line, we will need to create a story arc.

"Yikes!" I keep thinking. What have I gotten myself into?

So, I have come back to the drawing board...literally. As of right now, the students have done the following:

   * written four stories centered around how they helped solve problems using physical actions and achieved positive outcomes

   * chosen one of the four stories to become their graphic narrative

   * identified 6-8 verbs that describe their actions chronologically across their stories

   * identified 6-8 words to describe the feelings that go along with each action word

   * fine-tuned their verbs and adjectives to more precisely describe their actions and feelings

   * drafted two story panels.

I try to collect their work after each session and evaluate how the work is going. It became clear to me on Friday that the students need more support with being able to lay out a story across 6-8 story panels. The verb/adjective word lists were a good idea, and they are giving the writers some context for their drawings. However, we need to build a little more "composition" into the narrative, connecting each panel to the one before and the one that follows. I think the structure needs to be, say, a 2 panel beginning, a 2-3 panel middle, and a 2 panel end, give or take.

Flashback to me pacing in my classroom on Friday. Even as my excitement is building right along with this unit of study, I know I have to keep it accessible to 6- and 7-year olds. When is it too much? I tend to reach for the stars in terms of expectations and creative trajectory...

But, then I remember. All kids can write. And if we don't try, we will never know what we can accomplish. So, I will add lessons on building story mountains, and using space creatively, and drawing facial expressions to illustrate our feelings. Too much for first grade? I think not!!

Today I will be at the drawing board, creating a story arc with my panels. Don't worry. It's just practice and preparation. I will show the students how to do this with their own stories by thinking and drawing right in front of them.

Here is where I am starting...

This was draft number 1. Time for draft 2 and crafting a story arc across 6-8 panels. I know now that I need to be able to draw in front of you all as well! :) I'll share as we go!

Have a great writing week. And remember....

#allkidscanwrite

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Keep Them Smiling!

2/21/2016

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I went teaching.

What did you see?

I saw 19 kindergarten writers smiling at me!

We are published!

Our young writers have completed the fourth unit of study of the year, and we are, of course, as proud as we can be of their work and their continued enthusiasm for writing. The students worked through an eight-lesson Kindergarten Pattern Book unit of study that lasted across 3+ weeks due to snow days and delays. Highlights included introducing the idea of keeping a writer's notebook in which to store ideas for future writing. And we took two field trips (one inside and one outside) on which we looked for those ideas!

The scope and sequence of our unit was as follows:

Lesson 1 - Introducing the Mentor Text

Lesson 2 - Journal Brainstorming

Lesson 3 - Sounding Out Our Words

Lesson 4 - Adding Describing Words

Lesson 5 - Collecting Ideas

Lesson 6 - Choosing Our Best Ideas

Lesson 7 - Drafting Our Stories

Lesson 8 - Revising and Editing Our Stories

What is of utmost importance to remember is that our primary goal is to teach these young students how to think like writers. We want them to understand the process of composition. We know that their work will be approximate - and that will be just fine with us. We are wrapping so much teaching up in these lessons, but we know that this is just the beginning. Our writers are going to need lots and lots of practice with not only the work of composition, but, remember, they are still learning letter formation! Not to mention word and sentence formation!

Whew!! And to think, they are still all smiles when I walk into the room. Really! Every single one of them!

At the end of the week, as we were revising and editing, we asked the students to add their names to the cover/title sheet and to fill out an About the Author page to complete their books. I want these writers to understand that projects end. That there is a point at which the author puts his or her name on the work and says, "I'm done." I want the students to hold a completed project in their hands so that they get this concept. Authentic writing must include a finished product. And you, as their teacher, must express as much pride, enthusiasm, over-the-moon excitement as you can as you place those finished products in their hands. We want them to shout (okay, use their indoor voices), "That was great!!! What's next???" Following are examples from two of our authors' books.

This writer brings depth to her compositions, but she has resisted stretching out the sounds in words to approximate spelling. She has been content to use initial sounds only. We have explained to her that using initial sounds only in her spelling makes it difficult for her readers to understand her stories.

We modeled the spelling for the pattern words, "I saw a.....looking at me." You can see that this same writer is trying harder to include more sounds in her spelling of "shadow".

On her final page, our writer used environmental cues to correctly spell "yellow", and included the beginning and ending sounds in "sun" to approximate the spelling. She has come a long way!

Not all of our kindergarten writers are as advanced as the one above. But, as you can see below, even this young writer who must work so hard to put his thinking on the page leaves the unit of study with a smile on his face!

This writer's words are minimally expressed. We can make out "red bird", made easier by the excellent drawing! However, our writer is still struggling with spacing between words, stretching out and identifying sounds in words, and capitalization and punctuation.

This self-portrait, by the same student, simply makes my heart happy! Despite the struggles, despite the hard work, this little writer is still smiling!!

So, we keep on keepin' on! With attitudes like those of the students above, our work moves forward with great momentum!

"That's great! What's next?", you shout (not using your indoor voice!). Well, we are thinking about a unit of study centered around using journals (writer's notebooks) as places to not only record our ideas, but pages on which to compose stories.

We'll keep you posted!

Have a great writing week! And remember....

#allkidscanwrite

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Watch Out For That Speed Bump!!

2/14/2016

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Writing a unit of study is not for the faint of heart!! In fact, I find my heart beating wildly on this Valentine's Day morning...and not because someone special is downstairs making my favorite breakfast (he really is!). But because I hit a large speed bump this week in our first grade graphic narrative unit of study. And I need to back up and take another approach to this writing if it's going to work.

We began the unit on Monday with a few days of immersion in the graphic novel genre. I showed the students the book A Day at the Fire Station, by Lori Mortensen, and we talked about how to read a graphic novel. We noted that the story is told in panels (boxes) with pictures and speech bubbles. We talked about how you read a graphic novel from left to right and top to bottom, just like any other book. (Mortensen, L. (2011). A Day at the Fire Station, illus. Jeffrey Thompson. North Mankato, MN: Capstone Press.)

I then gave each group of three students another example of a graphic novel from our school library and a stack of sticky notes. I instructed them to look through the books and write down what they noticed about the writing on a sticky note to share with the class later. As I walked around the room, listening in on their conversations, I noticed that many of the students were writing notes about the content of the story, and not the form or structure of the writing.

One student thought the characters in his example "look creepy"! And another student noted that the story "is scary". They were examining a typical graphic novel in which the characters are drawn with dark colors and larger than life expressions. This clearly impressed them more than the structure of the writing!!

Once I redirected the students to look closely at how the graphic novels were written instead of what the novels were about, they became more focused and identified some important commonalities.

This writer noticed how smaller images of the main characters appeared on other pages in the book, including the title page.

Now the writers were paying attention to the writer's/illustrator's style and form on the pages of the graphic novel, including the use of color.

The students noticed that the story panels were of different sizes and shapes across the pages of the novels.

This writer captured a most important common element of graphic novels - "there are more pictures than words"!

So, the next day, the class and I made a "Writing Graphic Narratives" anchor chart:

Writing Graphic Narratives

Writers have to “write” with pictures and a few words.
Writers use what people say (dialogue) to move the story along and they use speech bubbles to do so.
Sometimes writers use text boxes inside the story panels to help tell the story.
Writers have to decide how much of the story to include in each story panel.
Writers have to decide how many story panels to have on a page.

The next BIG step was to decide which of our four stories we wanted to use in our graphic narrative unit. I had originally wanted to use all four stories to chronicle the first graders' journeys through the year; however, I decided that we would start with one story, see how it goes, and then re-evaluate our goals. And based on what I found out the next day, that was a very good decision indeed!!

My instructional plan was to move into our sketchbooks, find our story, and list all of the verbs in the sentences we wrote to go along with our pictures. I had practiced this move with my own story...

I showed the students how I used both the words in my sentences and the pictures of my story (some not seen here) to identify the "moves" I made in my story. (in pink)

Once the moves were identified by looking for verbs in the written sentences or remembering them from the pictures, my idea was to make a story panel with each one of those moves...So, I sent the writers off into their sketchbooks to find those verbs and identify those moves.

And that's where this writing teacher's forward momentum hit the speed bump. Most, if not all, of the students have very little written text to go along with their pictures. They don't have a firm grasp of what an action word (verb) is, nor how to independently identify it from a picture.

And now, after posting all of this for you, I can feel my heartbeat beginning to pound! This will be the work of today, and possibly tomorrow if we get the storm that is predicted. I am going to hit the brakes and take a long look at the speed bump. My next lesson will need to include more work with the idea of "moving", and how the students, as the writers/illustrators, conveyed the movements in their pictures. Maybe we will make a class list of words that go with movement, verbs, that students can use to identify their actions. Then, and only then, I will take my foot off of the brake pedal and begin to move forward slowly again.

You know, speed bumps are placed in the road before us for a reason. As teachers of writing, we are used to these bumps in our journeys to teach the complicated process of composition to and instill the habits of mind in our writers. We know to pay attention to them, to reflect upon their impact on our teaching, and to find ways to move ourselves and our students past them successfully.

So, I'll be planning a new route this Valentine's Day (after I enjoy that wonderful breakfast made my wonderful husband!) I hope your day is filled with happy hearts and very few speed bumps!!

Have a great writing week!

#allkidscanwrite

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Got Energy?

2/7/2016

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The energy was palpable! You could almost hear the kindergarten students' hearts beating as we lined up to go outside for our writing field trip on Friday. They clutched their sketchbooks and pencils with both hands and could not keep the smiles off their faces. They wriggled and shifted and bumped into each other. Our reminders to use quiet voices as we moved across the hall to the bus loop doors were less effective than usual. Those little writers could not wait to get outside and start noticing the world around them.

Got energy?

It's what it takes.

What we are trying to build in our classroom is excitement, a culture of enthusiasm wherein these kindergarten writers see writing as an opportunity for exploration and expression. How do we do that? And, more importantly, how do we extend it beyond this writing, beyond this unit, beyond even this year?

That's what we are trying to figure out! :) In our classroom, the teacher and I ask each other, "What next?" all the time. I rely on her multi-year kindergarten teacher's expertise when it comes to curricular and developmental expectations. She relies on my multi-year writing teacher's expertise when it comes to growing the habits of mind and building the classroom community that will produce students who think like writers.

We both agree that whatever is next - next minute, next day, next week, next unit - must be engaging and transferrable. The engaging parts are those parts that include lots of energy, creativity, and exploration. The fun that keeps the kindergarten writers so excited they can hardly sit still. The transferrable parts are the thinking and the process parts - that knowledge and those skills that will follow them from this writing to the next. From this year to the next.

So, when we went on our writing field trip, our goals were twofold. First, we wanted the student writers to go out, look at the world around them, notice some things, and then capture those things in their sketchbooks. We are going to ask the students to go back to their sketches to remember what they saw on their field trip when we write our pattern book starting this coming week.

But, second, we wanted to begin to build in our young writers' minds the habit of keeping a notebook (or sketchbook) in which to enthusiastically record what they notice in their lives - passing blue cars, fluffy-tailed squirrels, shifting shadows. And later, hopefully, they will use their notebooks to begin to capture the stories of their lives with words, just as descriptive and oh, so, important to hold onto. Noticing is a verb. It requires purpose, attention, and, yes, energy! We want to encourage our student writers to look at the world around them with eyes that actively see. With energy!

I brought the students' sketchbooks home with me this weekend, and I have been looking through them this morning. Some sketches are so brief and without detail, I will be interested to see if the writer remembers what he or she saw based on the drawings. Others included extensive picture details, some letter labels, and even some word labels. Our next lesson will be to go into our notebooks and choose two or three ideas to include in our picture book.

This writer took our directions to "quicksketch" seriously! We reminded him to include enough detail to remember what he had noticed on our field trip.

This writer drew most of his images with just enough detail and shape to be able to identify them when he goes to choose which ideas will go into his pattern book.

This writer included lots of detail in her sketches, from the top left image of her shadow on the ground in front of her, to the letter labeled bird and yellow sun, purple dress and blue car.

Tomorrow we will do a lesson on choosing our best ideas from our sketchbooks to include in our pattern books. I will share that lesson with you next time, and, hopefully, have some stories to tell about our writers' progress in their picture books.

Our mission is to maintain the energy level for this project. We can't go on field trips every day...but we want our writers to clutch their sketchbooks and pencils with both hands, keep those smiles on their faces, wriggle and shift in their seats and WANT to write every day!

We want all elementary school writers to be enthusiastic and eager to explore their lives and the world through writing. Let's get it started in kindergarten!

Have a great writing week!

#allkidscanwrite

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Show! Don't tell!

Keep Them Smiling!

Watch Out For That Speed Bump!!

Got Energy?

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