Endings and beginnings

This past week was my final week on campus for my 8 months of teacher education.  I had plans to absorb all the wonderfulness of this year, spend social time with as many friends as I could, and spend long hours in the resource centre writing my unit and lesson plans for the coming five weeks.

And then: sinus infection.  I get chronic sinus infections but have learned how to (sometimes) ward them off if I get them early. My distractions with school for the past two weeks meant I wasn't on top of my game and it is now a full-blown infection.  Getting out of bed is extremely difficult, using my brain is much more taxing than usual and I have a constant fever.  It wasn't the week I was hoping for.

Sometimes the endings we imagine don't meet with our expectations.

I had imagined Aarohi and I working methodically toward the end of her story, having time to caress her word choices, have discussions about sentence fluency and unusual word order that adds to the flavour of a story.  What happened instead is that I had to be reminded that I was working with a Grade 6 student who isn't keen on homework.  For our last meeting, Aarohi was supposed to have a draft of her story, "the bones of it".  Instead, she still had only two or so paragraphs.  She spent that meeting writing while I sat beside her and made suggestions of things to think about and changes she might want to consider.  We were able to touch on sentence fluency and unusual structure, which did make the start of her story more poetic.  I agreed to meet with her once more during my placement day on Thursday (and the unfortunate start of my sinus infection).

By Thursday, Aarohi had much more of her story done but she was veering off of her outline.  We got her back on track and she finished the story that evening at home, as it was due the next day, and sent it to me late that evening.  I would have liked to have time to work with Aarohi in her final editing.  She left out a bit of key information that would have helped the reader and her transitions needed some work.  It wasn't the ending to our time together that I had hoped for.

However.

When I sat down to write my final report on my work with Aarohi, I assessed the story she had written back in the fall.  I assessed it for the Ideas trait and the Organization trait as these were the two traits we focussed on the most in her current story.  She scored fairly low on both traits for that original piece.  When I assessed her new story, I was thrilled to find that she had advanced significantly in both of these traits.  The approach of writing a chronological outline first, after she arrived at an initial idea, really helped keep her story organized and driving her main idea forward.

The experience of being a one-on-one writing mentor taught me several things that I will take with me into my teaching career:

1. Set narrow goals.  Focus on one or two traits for a piece of writing.  Don't assess for everything.
2. Realize that a student in Grade 6 won't necessarily put in the time that you hope.
3. Take frequent breaks.  We used haiku writing as our break and it was really fun.
4. Some traits are really hard to teach because a good writer who is in her forties has been subconsiously applying practices to her writing for a very long time.  It's hard to explain how to do things like choose alternate words and write fluent sentences.
5. Because of #4, model good writing.  Write in front of the student so they can see how a writer works.
6. Use the 6+1 Traits of Writing as the base of a writing program.  Buying this book and following it - for the most part - was the best thing I did going into this experience.

That is a wrap for my one-on-one mentorship from my writing course.  However it isn't the end of this blog or reflecting on my teaching practice, reviewing resources, and finding inspiration in others.  I will continue to use this space to do all these things.

Tomorrow I begin my last practicum.  I will be armed with a unit plan on Dance and lots of antibiotics and kleenex. 

This is just the beginning.

Getting down to the nitty gritty

Last week, we split apart my group of three writing mentees so that they had a one-on-one mentor-mentee relationship.  Kevin and Andy went off with other mentors and Aarohi and I continued to work together on her short story.

At the end of my last post, I talked about how the chronological outline seemed to be working for Aarohi and I was hoping she would have it done by our next meeting.  Not so much.  Aarohi has a busy schedule.  Rather than moving ahead on her story last week, we continued to work together on the Ideas trait by finishing off her outline.

I find that writers in this age group have a difficult time maintaining focus on their storyline and tend to go off in several different directions with no end in sight.  I found that my most important role in this exercise was to keep her on the main path, focussed on the reader (what will the reader need to know and want to know?), and continually asking “does this make sense for your character?” and “does this drive the story forward?”.  At the end of our time together last week, Aarohi had completed her chronological outline.  I tasked her with finishing her story for me by this week (“just the bones of it,” I said) so that we could work on word choice, sentence fluency, etc.

I found that the chrono outline was just what she needed as a starting point to hone in on her main ideas and characters.  Too often student writers sit down to start their story, take off with writing and have no clear idea about where their story is going or even what it is about.  They run into trouble from the start, not surprisingly.  When I sit down to write an essay, a blog post, a paper, or a story, I almost always have a mental outline of what I’m going to write.  With an essay, I always have an outline written down on paper. It is the only way I can stay organized and keep focussed on my main arguments. When I wrote my Masters Thesis, I was surrounded by sticky notes, cue cards and research sheets and yes, paper outlines – many, many, many of them. The same kind of approach is necessary for fiction writing as well.  As an example, take a look at J.K. Rowling’s outline for Order of the Phoenix:

Like any good writer, she needed to set out the plot points, timelines, and story arc before she sat down to write.  This is such an important lesson in writing.  Ideas are the first step, but organization has to come right on the heels of ideas.  I’m very pleased that Aarohi has had the chance to discover how important this step is.

And I also discovered how important it is to give a student a break when needed… but we didn’t stop writing during our break! Instead, we wrote haikus.  And we laughed and laughed.  Here is a sample of Aarohi’s haikus from last week:

Aarohi loves cheese
She is a cool unicorn
That is the end. Bye.

Clifford the red dog
He looks like a big red log
He is so scary.

Mentoring student writers: working with the 6+1 Writing Traits

Linda, our professor for our Writing Across the Curriculum course, introduced us to 6+1 Traits of Writing by Ruth Culham.  It is, I have found, widely used by teachers to teach writing, although wasn’t used by my AT in my last practicum.  I bought a copy just before starting to work with my mentees, and I am so glad I bought it.  I have been eating up the chapters and really enjoying her sections on assessing writing (which I find challenging when the act of writing is so creative).  She breaks it down so well for each of her writing traits, has rubrics and sample pieces of writing written by real students that hit all the rubric levels.

Last week when I met with my mentees (Kevin, Andy and Aarohi), we focussed on the first of the writing traits: the Ideas trait.  I found, after reading the start of each of their fiction stories that they are currently working on, that they all needed help on the Ideas trait.  They each were at different points but were all wandering around in the weeds and had no idea where their story was going or what ending they were working toward.  In the case of Kevin, he didn’t have an idea for his story yet and didn’t know where to start.

Taking an idea from Culham, I had Aarohi and Andy each write a chronological list of what was happening or would happen in their story as a way to focus on the important points of the story and leave out details that didn’t matter to the telling of the story.  If you have Culham’s book, 6+1 Traits of Writing, I borrowed this from her idea on page 62 “My Scary Night”.  For Andy, I had him write a list of things he likes to do, to eat, to watch, to play, to talk about.  I asked him to choose something from his list as a starting point for an idea because when you can’t come up with an idea easily, the best thing to do is to write about what you know or love.  He decided he would write about Minecraft.  Ack! I know nothing about Minecraft so I was of no help at all when it came to understanding the story.  Thankfully, Mitch saved me this week and took over Andy’s mentorship.  Mitch can speak Minecraft.  I’m still in the MLD class. 

We ended our session last week with a way forward.  Each student was to keep working on their chronological outline and start writing their story (or, for Andy, take out parts that didn’t make sense in his outline).

I feel like we are making progress.  The Culham book is really giving me a focus when we meet and some specific strategies to try with my student writers.

Mentoring student writers

For the last two classes of my Writing Across the Curriculum class, we have been mentoring student writers at Hawthorne Public School, where I am doing my placement and practica. I am working with three of my Grade 5/6 students from my fall practicum.

During our first time together as mentor and mentees, I had them each write a poem and I participated as well.  They were to write nine lines, without using the word “writing” and were to title their poem “The Beauty of Writing” or “The Trouble with Writing”.  I adopted this idea (“leveraged” if you are using Government of Canada speak) from Deanna Young, a professional poet who visited our class at UofO.  I’m sure she would be happy with me leveraging her idea, since she is also an employee of the GoC and must fully understand the common practice of leveraging.

We realized after sitting there for quite some time that these students needed fewer lines so we lifted the requirement of nine lines to take the pressure off.

Here are the poems that my students wrote:

The Trouble with Writing by Kevin

I hate to write/It is so annoying and painful to see my mark/I want to rip up my mark/The words are very boring/I hate “dead words”/I hate to write.

The Beauty of Writing by Aarohi

A way of expressing feelings such as/depression/happiness/fear/anger etc/A way to put feelings onto paper/Writer’s block is like a block in front of your thinking capacity/if you have an idea it breaks through the block/that’s the beauty of writing.

The Beauty of Writing by Andy

I enjoy watching my fingers dance across the keyboard/I love watching a story being created word by word/I take pleasure in waiting for the mark that I will receive knowing/that I got good marks/how I love the beauty of writing.