Other teachers allowed their students to write fan fiction for their favorite books, or teleplays for their favorite television shows. Some teachers helped their students produce a class blog, which only their parents were able to read. If you owned your own robot, what would you ask it to do for you? If your pet could talk, what do you think he or she would say to you?Įven though the teachers in Texas had to prepare their fourth graders for an expository essay on the state writing assessment (really, you well-meaning test creators? What a great way to murder interest in writing for a whole generation of kids!) the most successful teachers found ways to let the kids write creatively because creative writing is fun and leads to fluency.
Some of those prompts made me smile, and many made me think. One teacher explained they started every ELA class with a quick writing prompt. During the second half of the year, the pages of those journals were already very full. But those journals definitely had been personalized to reflect their young owners’ interests and passions. The decorations weren’t expensive… usually the journals were covered with the students’ own drawings or pictures they’d cut from magazines. In the schools with the most skilled writers, invariably the kids came to my workshops with their journals proudly in hand, often decorated in colorful ways. The schools with staff who made writing cool and fun, and found clever ways to recognize good writing, produced confident, capable young writers. One might think those differences stemmed from disparities in economic backgrounds, but I quickly began to see that it was the amount of time devoted to writing, and even more importantly, the way writing was taught, that made the real difference. While conducting those workshops, I had a firsthand opportunity to witness the remarkable differences in the writing skills of students, often from the same districts and even from the same neighborhoods. A middle school teacher for many years, I always offered to teach writing workshops.
Because my first children’s book, The Neptune Project, was placed on several state lists, I have been invited to visit hundreds of schools all over the United States.
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