A Word or Two...
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
  • All Kids Can Write

Choice and the Hamburger Steak Incident...

9/30/2018

 
Picture
"I am who I am today because of choices I made yesterday." Eleanor Roosevelt.

Choice. The choices we make as people everyday determine who we will become tomorrow. And, the choices we make as writers at the outset of our work, influence what our work will become through the process.

Choice. One of the most important ingredients necessary for writers to be fully engaged in their work. Choice suggests intention, decision-making, and purposeful craft...this trio of mindful thinking empowers our students to take ownership of and care deeply about their writing.

This week, as I considered my story, I wondered about whether I should quickwrite the story on lined paper first, or just begin drafting it in my blank picture book.  I know that I am a planner, so my choice as a writer was to first begin drafting my story in text, sentence by sentence, in my writer's notebook. In this way, I could capture everything I could remember about the hamburger steak story in words before I try to pace it out across my picture book and add illustrations.

You have the same choice! Which approach best suits your style? Some writers prefer to sketch out a story before adding actual text. Sketching allows the writer's mind to see and visibly record the content of the story. And that is a terrific instructional approach with your students - all students - not just your primary kiddos. Other writers prefer to quickdraft, writing down everything about their stories in their notebooks before beginning to craft a product.

So, here is my quickdraft. As you read it, keep in mind that I am at this point simply trying to capture every detail that I can remember from that moment. (Deep Dive #5 Writers write down their stories fast and furious) This is not a draft to be scored for grammar, spelling, composition, etc. This is getting as much of my story down on paper before I start crafting it as a narrative piece.

Picture
As an adult sharing this story of my youth, I feel like I need to clarify for you all that I am/was an extreme rule-follower. So, this incident truly dramatizes the extent to which I did not want or was not capable of eating that hamburger steak!! Interestingly, I grew up to be a vegetarian. Every story is worth telling!

Looking at this draft using a lens of possible instructional guidance for the writer (me), I will need to address the following tenets of narrative writing that we considered in one of our ToeDips:  
  • Don't forget the dialogue! People in stories talk. When you are telling your story, try to remember what was said (or you can embellish since you might not remember exact words.) I did not recreate actual dialogue, although I referenced what characters said.
  • Avoid the passive voice and describe the action and events as if you were making a movie in your mind. (Some parts of my draft are told in this active voice, some are not).
  • Things happen in a beginning, middle, and end sequence - and there needs to be balance between the three story parts. The ending of my story is too abrupt.
So, how did it go for you this week? Did you choose a seed story from your list of small moments? Did you write or draw (or both) your story in a fast and furious way so that you could capture every detail that you can remember?

Read through your draft using an instructional lens. Does your story have action? Is it told using an active voice that engages the readers? Do your characters talk? Is there actual dialogue? How balanced are your beginning, middle, and end? Next time I will begin sharing specific lessons that address these narrative components.

Keep writing, teachers! I would love to hear your stories, so please share them here or you can email them to me (christywiz@aol.com). Bravo to you for working through the same process that you ask your students to undertake. It builds empathy and strengthens your teaching. You are making the powerful choice to engage with writing and to build your own capacity as a writer.

Have a great writing week!

#allkidscanwrite
#allteacherscanwrite
​

Summoning Our Artistry...

9/16/2018

 
Picture
Picasso said, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when he grows up." How many of us can relate to this loss of artistry as we grew up? As children, we tended to have less external constraints on our creativity. Things like time and the responsibilities of adulthood had not yet chipped away at our ability to sit quietly with our art and nurture its growth.

As adults, when we think about being writers in our classrooms or in our lives, we need to summon the artistry of our childhood back to our conscious minds. I am defining artistry here as creativity in any form, not just in writing. That ability to conceive of and express feeling and voice in ways that others can see and share.

Without fear.

So, let's keep moving with our picture books! Let's not be afraid to share our stories orally and on paper. Let's summon the creativity of our child-selves and write!  Today, we are ready to choose a seed story that we will develop into our picture book.

Choosing A Seed Story - Telling Our Stories Out Loud and On Paper

Deep Dives
  •  Deep Dive#3 - Writers choose the story that they remember the best to draft into a picture book.  When we write personal narratives, we want to bring readers into our stories, as if they are right there with us in the moment. To do that well, we must include lots of detail so that the reader feels immersed in our world. So, try to choose the story idea that you remember the best, with the most detail. Clear memories provide rich details that make our stories strong.
    • ToeDip - Choosing a story that has meaning. Not all stories are equal. Sometimes we can't recall enough detail about a story to be able to write it well. Or, we might remember lots of details about another story, but we don't feel emotionally connected to it. Try to choose a small moment that you both remember well and that was important to you. By choosing that moment, you will be able to capture and convey the heart of the story for your reader.
      • Think about each of your three small moments and consider which one you remember best.
        • Which moment do you remember with the clearest detail?
        • Which moment carries the most meaning for you?
        • Which moment do you feel eager to share with a reader?
  • Deep Dive#4 - Writers tell their stories to others first. It may seem counterintuitive, but writing is a very social interaction. The writer is engaging with a reader, and vice versa, not simply putting words down on paper. The process begins when a writer tells his story out loud to someone. Storytelling is the first step in capturing and conveying the details, the tone, the voice, and the scope of a story. And, the more often the writer tells his story, the more solid the story becomes, each oral version building upon the one before.
    • ToeDip - Storytelling 
      • ​You can tell your story in beginning, middle, and end chunks. By dividing your story into three parts, you can really think about what happened first, next, and last.
      • Don't forget the dialogue! People in stories talk! When you are telling your story, try to remember what was said (or you can write what was probably said since you might not remember exact words).
      • Avoid using a passive voice, but rather describe the action and events as if you were making a movie in your  mind. Telling your story using an active voice will engage your listener and help her feel as if she is right there in the moment with you.
  • Deep Dive#5 - Writers write down their stories fast and furious. Once writers have told their stories out loud a few times, they can move to a clean piece of paper and write the story of the small moment, capturing every single detail that they included in the oral version of the story. The idea is to write fast and furious, not worrying at all about grammar and conventions at this point. This is the time for writers to move the small moment story, all of it, to paper.
    • ToeDip - Writing Fast and Furious. It is very important that you write for more than a few minutes. Writing is thinking work, and we have to build writing muscles in order to write well. As soon as you think you are finished, ask yourself, "What else?" and keep going.
      • Move to a clean piece of paper and write down the story of your small moment.
      • Write fast and furious - keep writing down everything you remember about that moment.
      • When you think you're done, keep going. You will be surprised what other details appear as your pen continues to move across the paper.

As I look over the three small moment stories I wrote down in my sketchbook, I decide to choose the "Me vs. the Hamburger Steak" story. The nagging adult voice in my head is saying that this is not much of a story, inconsequential and silly. That voice is trying to convince me that no one, anywhere, would want to read about the hamburger steak debacle. But, I am not going to listen to the adult voice in my head. I am going to summon my childlike sense of artistry and feel brave enough to tell this story. I will not be afraid to try.

If you are feeling any discomfort as you go through this process, remember that feeling when you are asking your students to do this same work. Aside from being important to your own writing self, making this picture book will build empathy in you for all of the young writers who are struggling. While  creativity still dances in their hearts, young writers need our empathetic guidance to keep self-doubt away as long as possible! Every single story has value.

I'm going to be working on my story this week. Maybe we can share our stories with each other next time!

Have a great writing week!

#allkidscanwrite
#allteacherscanwrite



LOVE for Everything Writing!

9/2/2018

 
Picture

According to author and psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross "There are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear." She also believed that these two emotions are mutually exclusive, that we cannot live in a state of fear and love at the same time. 

Is it possible, as suggested by Kubler-Ross's theory, that all of the negative energy that flows around writing instruction in our classrooms may actually stem from fear?

Whoa!   What?    Hold on a minute!

Let's flip this thinking around right now and, instead, consider how we might create positive energy around writing instruction in our classrooms by learning to LOVE the process, LOVE the product, and LOVE the community that grows when everyone is a writer! 

As an elementary literacy support specialist in my district, I conduct a lot of professional learning sessions in August. One line that I uttered at many of these sessions got a big laugh every single time - "You only have to be a little bit better writer than your students." When I said this, teachers could breathe, relax, and let go of the fear of not being confident as writing teachers. They smiled, looked at each other, and I could practically see the negative energy leave the room.

Love conquers Fear! 

Remember last time I talked about making picture books? Let's begin to build our love for everything writing by authoring a picture book. This genre is appropriate to teach writing to all levels of students because all children are familiar with the structure of a picture book. And, so are all teachers! We can call on this very familiar context to be the foundation for our first writing experience, much like we do for our pre-K and kindergarten students.

I'm using the analogy of swimming for our writing lessons. Being comfortable in any body of water is scary for lots of people; and water has a metaphorical vibe for being an "unknown". So, we will start with what I call Deep Dives. These are the simple truths about what we are learning. We anchor all of the strategies of writing on the Deep Dives. 

Generating Ideas - The "I Don't Have Anything To Write About" Fear

Deep Dives:
​
  1. Deep Dive#1 Writing is storytelling:  When we write personal narratives, we are telling stories about our lives. Let's think about story.
    • Things happen -
      • Action/Events
    • There are characters -
      • Who say things.
      • Who do things.
    • Things happen in sequence -
      • Beginning
      • Middle
      • End
  2. Deep Dive #2 Writers get ideas from their own lives:  Writers get ideas from their own lives,
    • BUT, sometimes writers have a hard time thinking of ideas,
    • SO, we read books to spark ideas. 
      • Mentor texts can give us a jumping off point, inspiring us to consider something that happened in our lives that could be interesting to a reader.
Next, are the ToeDips. ToeDips are the instructional practices I want you to try. Going back to our swimming analogy, before anyone jumps into a pool for the first time, they most likely stick their big toe in for a temperature check. To me, ToeDips represent the first, safe step in what can be an unknown situation. 
  1. ToeDip - Thinking of Ideas​
    • Read Fireflies!, by Julie Brinkloe (or find it read aloud on YouTube if you don't have a copy on hand) and
      • Think about the specific kinds of things you did when you were a kid, like catching fireflies in the evening.
      • Remember those small moments of your childhood that were part of how you grew up.
      • Take out your sketchbook/writer's notebook and turn to a clean page. Make a list of at least 3 small moments in your childhood that you can remember with some detail.
​         (ToeDipTip:  Small moments are usually stories about things that happen in a short amount of time, small snapshots of time in which something happens. They are not big stories that cross large amounts of time.)​​

Picture
My sketchbook with 3 small moment ideas listed.
There! That's a wonderful start. I hope you can feel the joy  of remembering small moments from your childhood. We have to train ourselves to believe that we, too, have stories to tell. That no memory is insignificant. That all of our stories have value and should be shared. If we want our students to believe this, we have to believe it in our own hearts as well!

Next time, we will think about which of our small moments we want to expand into a full narrative. I want to thank Lucy Calkins and all of the great work that has come out of Teachers College at Columbia University for the foundational thinking I am sharing with you. She inspired my love of writing, love that replaced fear, which has, in turn, inspired hundreds of my students to love writing as well.

I hope you are inspired to love writing, too! Have a great writing week! 

#allkidscanwrite
#allteacherscanwrite

    Why write?

    I once heard the story of a writer who caught her own reflection in a window. She realized that once she moved past that window, the moment of her reflection would be lost to her forever.

    And so it is with all of our lives. 

    Writing is catching a life moment in words... keeping it visible to be remembered, to be cherished, to be learned from.

    Preserving it forever. 

    That is why I write.

    Archives

    September 2022
    June 2022
    August 2021
    June 2020
    March 2020
    December 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    September 2018
    August 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    December 2016
    April 2016
    November 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014

    Categories

    All
    Agents
    Authors
    James River Writers
    Revision
    SCBWI
    Story
    Writer
    Writing

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.