I was super excited to teach ELA this year. I was even more excited to try out some new strategies for helping the students with their writings. I had put together cute but informative slideshows; I had broken down the writing process into what I thought were truly manageable pieces; and I had started the year with a rather open-ended narrative writing, believing most kids would find success with this genre. I thought a narrative was a great way to take what we were learning about themes from our reading standards and apply it to our writing as well.
I was wrong.
The students struggled. They got frustrated. They ignored examples, ignored lessons, ignored checklists, ignored feedback and some turned in truly dreadful examples of a narrative.
Last week, we began the process anew, but with the added element of writing a fairy tale. I hoped this would provide us with a lot of practice using quotation marks and paragraphs along with the skills we had started working on for first narratives. I also hoped that writing fairy tales would be engaging enough to help pull in some of the students who didn’t seem to care much about this genre.
During the brainstorming and planning stages, I was met with lukewarm responses. A few students were excited, but overall, I wasn’t optimistic that I had lit any kind of fire under my more reluctant authors.
Today we began drafting. I reminded the class that these would not be good drafts, they were merely a starting place for all the work we would do to make our tales amazing. Most of the students had learned this through the first process and were at least a little more understanding of how much work was ahead of us. But for today, we just focused on starting to put our ideas on paper. We pulled out our fairy tale elements page to refer to and we looked to our graphic organizer that we’d already filled in to help us guide our story along from opening to problem through a solution and hopefully, to a happily-ever-after resolution.
I normally wander throughout the room while the students write, but today I didn’t want to be too readily available for questions, spelling assistance or any guidance. I wanted them to put in some independent work first before looking around the room for their Fairy Godmother to come help them. As I watched my little authors, I heard one of my more reluctant writers who had really struggled with his first narrative writing, mutter, “Oh, no. Not yet!” I asked what that was all about and he shared with the class, “I was about to write something about someone that would tell a thing, but then I thought Whoa, Whoa, WHOA! NOT YET! And I decided to add more details to add suspense first!” It was such an exciting moment for him (and for me)!
Moments later, another student asked if she could stop writing for a few minutes and go look at some fairy tale books for inspiration. I applauded the idea, reminding her that referring to exemplars is always a great way to be inspired! She went straight to my crate full of fairy tales and dove into some books. Another student finished his draft (for today) and was already reading some fairy tales. He exclaimed, “I just got a great idea!” He put the book down, grabbed his drafting notebook and added to his story.
Only time will tell if we end up writing happily forever after, but it’s obvious we have already grown as authors. For me, even if the conventions and processes are lagging, if there’s excitement, we are on the right track! To see these students inspired and enthusiastic and eager to improve today not only lit them up inside but reassured me, their ELA teacher, that we are indeed making good progress! The moral of this tale: if you believe in them, the kids will often surprise you!
Teaching at 3am 