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.