The Art of Teaching Children, page 15
“How much can we bring?” asked Maggie.
“As much as you want,” I answered.
A loud “Whoa!” sped around the room.
“Can I bring a million dollars?” Cecelia broke in.
“You may,” I said, emphasizing the word.
She squealed.
Ivan picked up on my correction. “May I bring a billion dollars?” he wanted to know.
“Absolutely,” I replied.
Another “Whoa!”
“May I bring my dog?” Alicia asked quickly.
“Of course,” I confirmed. “It’s your dream trip.” I looked at the group. “What about your parents? Don’t you want to bring them with you?”
“No!” they boomed.
When I finished chuckling, I said, “Well, if you don’t bring your parents, you might want to bring a smartphone so you can speak with them.”
“I don’t have one,” George grumped.
“It’s a pretend trip,” I reminded him. “You can bring whatever you want.”
Frederick sat up straight. “Then I’m bringing an iPhone!”
“Me too!” Jake declared.
I squinted at him. “I’m not sure iPhones will work on Mars.”
“Sure they will!” Eduardo proclaimed. “iPhones work everywhere!”
Immediately I had a thought. Apple should hear this conversation. I could picture the company’s Super Bowl commercial in my head: A bunch of third graders plan their dream trips and choose to bring their iPhones over their moms and dads.
* * *
Teaching writing to children demands craft, enthusiasm, and a lot of stamina. When I was a student teacher, I remember my master teacher telling me that if I felt tired after writing with children, I was doing it right. Learning to write isn’t easy, and teaching children to write isn’t easy either. Teachers work hard at it.
We give lessons on expository, descriptive, and narrative writing. We teach persuasive and creative writing too. We instruct children in how to write engaging leads, use powerful verbs, incorporate dialogue, show don’t tell, “stretch” sentences (My dog sleeps. My dog sleeps on the rug. My dog sleeps on the rug all day long), and also vary the length of them: “This sentence has five words. This one has the same. It sounds like a robot. Let’s try to change them.”
We hand out colored sticky notes so that kids can put them into books to identify topic sentences and supporting details. We pass out rubrics and worksheets and checklists to remind children to capitalize and punctuate and spell correctly, though we know that when they hand in their papers, they’ll be missing capitals and periods and have lots of misspellings.
We draw giant fishhooks on chart paper to remind kids to “hook” their readers and huge hamburgers to show the parts of a paragraph (top bun: main idea; hamburger patties: supporting details; bottom bun: restate the main idea). We make construction paper tombstones with the words RIP SAID to remind our students that said is dead. Use a synonym.
We distribute lists of transition words and sentence starters and character traits so that children can cut them out and pound them into their writing notebooks after rubbing glue sticks all over the back. We cover our walls with posters of the writing process, editor’s marks, and mug shots from Alcatraz outlawing the use of LOL, OMG, and WDYT in our kids’ writing.
We use catchy terms such as “vivid verbs,” “wow words,” and “awesome adjectives” to make them more exciting. We create writing corners stocked with pencils, pens, markers, and trays with all kinds of paper: wide ruled, college ruled, newsprint, graph paper, sheets with dotted lines, bordered paper, and special paper with lines on the bottom half and big open rectangles on the top for children to draw pictures.
We hang up colorful anchor charts that we made in our fanciest teacher writing with funny acronyms like OREO to help kids with their persuasive paragraphs (state opinion, give your reason, provide an example, and restate your opinion) and COPS to help them edit (capitals, organization, punctuation, and spelling).
As springboards for children to write, we read them books about terrible, horrible days, and jolly postmen, and old women who swallow things. We cut out construction paper “books” to look like pumpkins, turkeys, mittens, hearts, and slices of bread (for writing directions on how to make a peanut butter sandwich) because we know that having books shaped like these things motivates children to want to write.
When our students have completed their final drafts, we put them into portfolios, thumbtack them onto bulletin boards, and tape them onto walls, hoping that when we take them down, we don’t upset the custodian by also pulling off the paint. Sometimes, if it’s an important assignment and a child wrote several pages, we slide them into the loud spiral binder machine in the staff room because we know that having your writing held together with a shiny plastic spiral makes it special.
* * *
For me, the writing period was one of the most enjoyable times of the day. I liked brainstorming ideas with my kids and hearing their ideas. I found it charming when children would link arms with their buddies like Barrel of Monkeys toys after I said they could write with a partner. I got a kick out of looking at little faces scrunch up when thinking of ideas—and then light up when they got one. I liked seeing kids scribble their ideas hurriedly on their papers so they wouldn’t forget. It made me happy when children would read over their own writing and giggle at what they had just written. I enjoyed listening to them share what just made them giggle.
This might sound funny, but I actually like the way children’s papers look. To me, there’s something sweet about a child’s slightly oversized letters and punctuation marks that fill up most of the space between the lines and the little hints of personal style already peeking through their penmanship: an extra loop here, a little flourish there. It’s the un-adultness of their writing that charms me. Kids’ papers are like baby animals. Their legs are still wobbly.
Over the years, I learned a lot about the teaching of writing from my students. The children taught me that it is more fun to write a story if you put yourself and your friends into it. It’s fun to include your teacher in the story too. I discovered that when making a comma, if you start it off with a big thick dot and then finish it with a tail, it looks like a tadpole. A quotation mark looks like two tadpoles swimming together. I learned that making hyphens can also be fun, especially when you’re in the middle of writing a word and you reach the pink line that runs down the right side of the paper. Then you get to karate chop your word with a hyphen before writing the rest of it on the next line. My students taught me that some kids like to write above the line—I call these “flying letters”—and some will write midway through them like their words are sinking. “Titanic letters.” I found out that children don’t like to indent paragraphs, to write in complete sentences, to make capital letters unless it’s SOOOO or ZZZZZ or THE END, or to put in periods—except when you give them a paragraph to edit without any periods and ask them to fill in the missing periods with M&M’s. If they know that they get to eat all the candy after they finish editing, they will find every period that is missing in record time. And I learned that there are three different ways to cross out a misspelled word: with a straight line, a squiggly one, or by scratching out the word with your pencil so many times that it ends up looking like top-secret, heavily redacted, highly classified material that must never be found out or else you will be killed.
After giving thousands of writing lessons and reviewing tens of thousands of kids’ papers, I’ve learned what children need to be successful writers. The following is a list of general thoughts and strategies for helping your students learn to write successfully too.
Have Children Write Often
When I was a kid, my piano teacher, who was also my grandma, used to give me the Practice Speech when it was clear that I hadn’t practiced for my lesson. It went like this: “If you miss one day of practice, you notice. If you miss two days, your teacher notices. Three days—and your audience notices.” I didn’t like to practice the piano, so I would get the Practice Speech a lot. Just like learning to play the piano, writing requires regular practice too. Writing is a craft—like carpentry, knitting, and cooking—and the more you practice, the better you become at it. So try to have your students write every day or almost every day. Play soft music in the background. Make it a routine.
Let Your Kids Write All Sorts of Things
Give children lots of different writing experiences. Have them write lists and sentences, stories and poems, paragraphs and wanted posters for the Big Bad Wolf. Ask them to write cards, brochures, reports, journal entries, and Mother’s Day coupon books in which they promise to take out the garbage and go to bed without whining. Have them interview their parents to find out what life was like when they were young. Let them research the meaning of their names. Invite them to write to an author. They’ll be excited when they receive a reply. Ask them to write notes to colors (“Dear red, I use you to draw apples and ladybugs. Please don’t quit!”) and messages from the Gingerbread Man (“Please don’t eat me! Eat peppermints. They taste better!”). Have them compose letters to their future selves that they can slip into “time capsules” made out of empty plastic liter-sized bottles wrapped with large warnings to not look inside for twenty years and topped with caps covered with gobs of tape to make sure that no one does.
Allow Children to Write with a Friend
Some kids like to write alone, while others like to write with someone else. Give students the option of working independently or writing with a partner. Buddy writing. When you ask your kids to find a friend to write with, three girls will come up to you embraced tightly in a group hug, begging you to let them work together. Let ’em.
Let Your Students Spread Out All Around the Classroom
Personally, I don’t like to write at a desk. When I’m writing, I prefer to sprawl out on my couch at home or on an overstuffed chair in a position that would make my chiropractor have a heart attack. Kids are the same. Some children like to write at a desk, but many prefer not to. During writing time, allow your students to work all over the classroom. For kids, writing is more fun when they are out of sight from their teacher. Note: Do not let children go outside to work on the jungle gym even if they promise that they will. It won’t happen.
Explain What Writing Is Supposed to Look Like
Children do not like rewriting, so it’s important to tell them why we ask them to. Explain to your students that writing is not like the other subjects. In math, for example, when you answer the problem 3 x 5, you don’t look at the 15 and try out different numbers to see if they might express more clearly what you’re trying to say. The answer is 15. Period. If you read a word in a book correctly, you do not linger over it, thinking of others that might sound better. You move on to the next one. But writing is different. Writing is rewriting. Teach your kids this. Get them used to writing more than one draft—a “sloppy copy”—and a final draft. For children, two drafts are enough. Kids needn’t write two drafts of everything, but I would recommend that they write second drafts of their important papers.
To illustrate the writing process to my students, sometimes I would share a piece of needlework that my grandma had made. I’d explain that the front side of the needlework is like the final drafts of their writing. The mistakes have been corrected. It is pleasing to the eye. And then I’d turn the piece over. After the burst of “Whoa!”s—kids do not expect the back to look like this—I’d tell them that the back side, with all its crisscrossed threads and knots and loose ends, represents their first drafts full of crossed-out words and arrows and spelling mistakes. You can’t create the beautiful side without the messy one.
Proofread with a Purpose
It’s not easy for children to proofread their own work. One of the reasons is because they’re looking for too much at once. So, have your kids go over their work in stages: one time for spelling (I’d just have them circle words they thought might not be correct) and a second time for missing periods and capitals. Kids do not want to check their papers more than twice. That’s their limit. One of the best ways for children to proofread their work is to have them read it aloud. It slows them down so that they catch missing words and punctuation, clunky sentences, and parts that don’t make sense. Before your students hand in their work, ask them to read their papers out loud with a pencil in hand. If the weather is nice, send them outside. On many days, the courtyard outside my classroom was filled with children talking to themselves.
Conference with Your Kids
One afternoon, I was sitting with my student teacher when she finished editing a batch of my kids’ writing. “There!” she announced happily. “All done. Yay!” As she started filing away the papers, I looked at her and said, “I hate to break it to you, but you’re not finished. Now you have to review the papers with each child.” Her eyes got huge. It hadn’t occurred to her.
After you have edited your students’ work, hold short writing conferences with them. They needn’t take long, sometimes just a couple of minutes. You won’t be able to conference with children about all their work because of limited time. One middle school teacher friend of mine uses a deli-style format during her writing conferences. She passes out numbered “tickets” to all of her students. When she’s ready for the next conference, she flashes a number on the screen along with the words “Now Serving.”
When speaking to students about their writing, of course start by noting the positive. Then point out a few things for them to fix. Don’t review all the errors. You do not want to overwhelm them. Just as reading conferences are important for developing readers, writing conferences are essential in helping kids grow as writers. It’s also a nice time to have some one-on-one.
Share Children’s Writing with Other Children
When your students complete a writing assignment, make copies of some of the better pieces and save them for the following year. Then, if you’re repeating the activity, pass out the copies to your current students. Kids enjoy reading papers written by other kids. They connect to them in a different way.
Write the Room
This activity gets kids out of their seats and adds a little zip to their learning. Say, for example, you want your students to practice editing. Instead of having them edit at their seats, let them do it around the room. Just post a dozen or so cards on the walls and cabinets of your classroom. On them have sentences with spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes. The kids grab clipboards and recording sheets, then walk around and write the sentences correctly on their papers. Writing the Room can be used for anything, really—solving math problems, matching vocabulary with definitions, practicing spelling, and reviewing the content in any unit of study. Make one card a silly one. It adds to the fun.
Read a Child’s Writing to the Rest of the Class
Can you remember when a teacher read your writing to the class? I can: grade two, Miss Greco; grade eight, Mrs. Watson; grade ten, Mr. Duncanson. And I can remember exactly where I was sitting when they read them. As you walk around your classroom during writing time, pick up a student’s paper now and then and announce, “Boys and girls, sorry to interrupt, but I want you to listen to this.” Then read a sentence or two to the whole class. The child whose paper you just picked up will never forget it. It makes that much of an impact. When teaching writing, you’re not just building children’s skills but also their confidence as writers.
Write—Don’t Type—First Drafts
Some teachers have their students type their first drafts. I don’t recommend this for children in elementary school. When kids type their first drafts, they’re not focused fully on their writing. They’re hunting for letters on the keyboard and thinking about what font they want to use. Every primary teacher knows that it can take a child five minutes to type one sentence on a laptop—ten on an iPad. On a good day. If you ask one group of children to handwrite their first drafts and another group to type theirs, the handwritten papers will always be superior. There’s no comparison. Although laptops and iPads certainly have their time and place, you don’t have to use them all the time.
Share Your Own Writing
A lot of teachers are closet writers. If you’ve written something that you think your students would enjoy, share it with them. It’s one of the best ways to encourage kids to write. It also shows children what the process of writing looks like. A couple of times a year, I would bring my own writing into school and share it with my kids. I’d show them my multiple drafts of the same piece, so that they saw that grown-ups have to write more than one too. Inevitably, one child would ask how many drafts I had written, and I’d tell them that sometimes I revised a piece more than a dozen times till it was just right. To that, half the kids would collapse on the floor.
When I was working on my first book, 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny, I’d occasionally share some of it with my third graders—sort of like a tryout. All the stories were set in school. The children knew I was hoping to sell the manuscript. One morning, as I was reading one of the chapters, the kids began laughing. A good sign. I read them a second piece, and they chuckled some more. This is going great, I thought. The children asked me to read a third story, and even though it cut into our science time, I said, “Why not?” I picked another piece I knew they’d enjoy. But this time, no one laughed. Not even a giggle. When I finished reading, I looked at the kids and said, “Why didn’t you laugh?”
