As children we were taught the proper formation of letters of the alphabet, lower and upper case, and in most instances we were taught cursive. We were taught proper syntactic and semantics of writing along with the various formats of essay writing, but what for? As I have grown older and experienced the required practice of assignment writing, it was not until I began to write without a purpose, or for an assignment, that I understood the individual satisfaction of writing. It is not to say that I do not appreciate the rigor of practicing format and structure, but was content, creativity and descriptive writing forgotten? Maybe not, but for me as a child, those things definitely took back seat to being grammatically correct. As I have begun the process to teach others about writing, I have begun to think about writing differently. Does being a writer mean being a booklover? Does reading correlate to being a better writer? I am not sure of the answer to these questions, but from what I am learning, it definitely does not hurt to be a person who reads, when it comes to writing.
I have begun reading the book titled Bird by Bird, written by Anne Lamott, a realistic and funny guide to the challenges that writing can bring; the title comes from the idea that writing comes in steps, processes and ideas. Lamott describes her struggle with choosing writing as her career path, but she finds value in teaching others about the truth of writing. As Lamott describes, “good writing is about telling the truth….(yet) telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat” (pp.3). From reading parts of her book, I understand that teaching others to love writing can be challenging, because writing is challenging. Most people want to be good at new things immediately, but most of us are not; we need practice, and more practice and most importantly we need connection to what we are writing.
I am currently working with a young reader and writer, whom is just at the beginning stages of the writing process. According to Barbara Fox, and her book ,“Word Identification Strategies, he is in the stage of partial alphabetic, meaning he is just beginning to understand the alphabetic principle (Fox p.18). As I have begun to work with him, I quickly learned that his favorite thing in the world is SpongeBob. I have decided to use this knowledge to help gain his attention, by incorporating SpongeBob literature and books into our interactions. Through his own personal interest in SpongeBob I hope to gain his curiosity in learning more about reading and writing. My goal as a teacher is to help motivate and facilitate honest, creative ideas while maintaining the principle that we all make mistakes and we just need to use those mistakes to help us learn.
It's great when teachers can combine what they want to teach with what kids want to learn. I'm not exactly sure how to say this, but when teachers pay attention to what kids care about, the kids know that they are visible to the teachers and that what they care about is valued.
ReplyDeleteSpongeBob sounds like a fantastic vehicle. I hope that you and your buddy are both having a great time.
Nancy
Writing is indeed a difficult task, especially when the writer does not have the tools to write (command of the alphabet or command of spelling and other conventions). In our first grade class, the teacher suggested having the student say parts of their story and then count the number of words. This helps them begin to see that words are distinct sets of letters. I think it important to enjoy writing. We know how hard it is to write and our students learn this quickly. How do we make it a thing of joy? Writing can be like reading or anything else we truly enjoy. The other day I was writing my vignette and could not stop. I could not get the words out fast enough on the keyboard and I did not want to stop writing. When I wrote my second vignette, I ended up writing something I had not planned. Then I had to go back and write a third vignette for myself. How do we allow our students to reach that place of inspiration and then have the opportunity to stay in that moment before it passes?
ReplyDelete"How do we allow our students to reach that place of inspiration and then have the opportunity to stay in that moment before it passes?"
ReplyDeleteI love that!
I too have reflected before on how important reading can be for writers. I have watched my sister read book after book and almost fill what seems like a journal for every book she reads (slight exaggeration since she has filled about 45 journals and read countless books, but none the less she reads and writes a lot). Relating what I see her do to what I do, I don’t write with the same passion and love as she does but I also find reading to be a chore sometimes. Just as you mention that it is challenging to get others to love writing because writing itself it challenging I wonder what can teachers do to help students love writing or stop doing because it’s causing them to not like it. Is it comparable to what we learned in our art class over the summer that students seek to hear the words “good” or “excellent” and are not getting the constructive feedback that is needed? Or does it have to with the challenging rubric that does not allow students to be creative with what they write? I found that I started to appreciate writing more when it was on a topic I chose. For example these blogs have been very enjoyable because I have had some freedom of choice. Routman mentions that teachers should give students a lot of time for free writing for them to just write without having to “rubricize” them or hold them to any kind of standard. I really believe in this and think writing can be loved a little easier if students realize that much like art it a medium for self expression.
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