Monday, January 10, 2011
Boy Writers, by Ralph Fletcher
Now that we have finished the book Boy Writers by Ralph Fletcher, where do we go from here? Let's share our ideas. What do you intend to do (or what have you already done) in your classroom to address the needs of boy writers? Do you think these changes or initiatives will also have a positive (or negative) impact on your girl writers? What other ruminations, epiphanies, or pearls of wisdom can we muster?
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Chapter 10, Conferring About Craft, really spoke to me. I agree that boys seem to pick up craft elements less readily than girls do, and that boy stories tend to have less structure than girl stories. I have quite a few students who are, as Ralph Fletcher puts it, hell-bent on writing their piece exactly as they want.
ReplyDeleteConferring with these students can be very frustrating for me. The conferences tend to drag on, and I sometimes hear myself starting to sigh. This chapter warns teachers that many boys are hyper-aware of our body language and nonverbal signals, and that this can affect their confidence as writers. The problem is that I personally don't enjoy reading stories that are totally unstructured and overly silly, so it is hard for me to see their value.
But this weekend, I saw a show called Story Pirates After Dark, and it TOTALLY changed my feelings about this kind of writing. The Story Pirates are an arts and creative writing organization that run creative writing and drama workshops in elementary schools. They teach children creative writing and then present a sketch comedy musical (complete with AMAZING costumes and puppets) based entirely on the stories the kids write. Here's their website: http://storypirates.org/
One skit I saw over the weekend was based on the kind of writing that normally frustrates me to no end. And yet it was one of the best skits in the show! The actual story went something like this: "Cars are crashing into robots. Robots kiss the windshields. And the batteries die. If they stay still the batteries come back." The Story Pirates made this into a song that featured dancing actors dressed as robots or limo passengers (wearing tuxedos, top hats, and mustaches). The words were not changed, but the lines were repeated many times in the song. The skit was put together in a way that made it truly hilarious!
The show made me see this kind of seemingly random and silly action writing differently. Maybe the problem isn't these stories themselves- it's how we read them. It's hard to enjoy (or even tolerate) these kinds of stories when we're teaching a realistic fiction unit and trying to teach kids to develop a plot. Perhaps if creative writing became a real and valued part of the curriculum, boy writing would be more appreciated and better understood.
I just looked at their website - Story Pirates sounds fantastic! We should try and get them to come to EVCS.
ReplyDeleteI am hoping that in reading this book our school can move to making creative writing a real and valued part of our curriculum as it once was. I am glad that we adopted the TC Curriculum as it put us all on the same page and gave us a common language in what kids and teachers need to do to create a good piece of writing but it has taken away the passion for writing and we need to get that back.
ReplyDeleteI keep returning to a truly lovely piece of writing included in the book. It comes from a Southern boy writing about a right of passage: his first gunshot. Whereas this could be viewed as politically volatile material, the tenderness in the writing superceded that for me. Time really slowed down for this boy and you could feel the gravity of the experience. It was lyrical, descriptive, full of detail and nuance; the writer's voice truly shone through!
ReplyDelete-Yadir
Reading another Ralph Fletcher book, What a Writer Needs. First thing I posted, "You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing excercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you." and in talking about what we can teach our kids about elements of writing,-"I tried to choose those elements of writing that are not specific to any one genre but could help writers develop their craft in many different kinds of writing."
ReplyDeleteIn chapter five, Fletcher talks about the idea of bringing back choice to Writing Workshop. He writes, “Boys crave choice when they write. I surveyed nearly five hundred boys, trying to unearth their attitudes and experiences about writing…The overwhelming response to [my] question was a plea for more choice: Create our own topic. Choose. Write whatever we want” (p. 45). Fletcher’s idea here really stayed with me and I reflected on our own Writing Workshop, realizing the space for choice was incredibly narrow. All of our students have to write within the same genre. I also thought about the overall tone of the room during Writing Workshop. So many of our students, especially the boys, seemed so anxious and uptight when it was time to write. Because of this stress and uneasiness, Writing Workshop was one of the hardest periods to manage…
ReplyDeleteFletcher goes on to suggest teachers should schedule “Free Choice Zones,” where “time to time kids can have complete choice in bringing their interests and obsessions into the writing classroom” (p. 46). After talking about this idea with our small group one staff meeting, Jeanine and I decided to implement Free Write Fridays. We bought journals for each student, and introduced the journals as a place where they could write about anything, and write in whatever genre they wanted: fiction, non-fiction, comic books, etc… All of our students loved the idea and took to it quickly. After a week or two, Leslie suggested to us that we dedicate a whole unit to Journal Writing, which Clara, Jeanine and I implemented this past January. I think I can speak for all three of us when I say it was a huge success! So many of our students, boys AND girls, released their inhibitions, forgot about their anxiety related to writing, and their thoughts flowed. We couldn’t believe the volume of writing some students produced, some who were barely writing at the beginning of the year. We also let students write wherever they wanted to, another suggestion of Fletcher’s – and this seemed to positively help students, too. For most students, our Journal Unit seemed to make writing less tedious, more engaging, and even fun! Though the unit is ending this week, we intend to keep going with Free Write Fridays, as well as provide more opportunities for choice during Writers Workshop.
As a Pre-K teacher foundation is important. The first prints that children produce are pictures. Drawings are how they express themselves. In chapter 13 Fletcher states, "You find passion and humor in boy's drawing. You find voice." (121). It is amazing to see the intricacies of their work from both the nonrepresentational and symbolic drawing. However, many of the children at the Pre-K age are unaware that their drawings are a way of communication of their ideas. It is our job to introduce this concept and help them find their voice. The artwork is an introduction to writing and should not be dismissed. Fletcher agrees as in Chapter 17 the answer to one of his questions is, "We've got to stop thinking of writing and drawing as two separate things... Let's try to conceive of drawing as part of the writing process itself." (159). Drawing is what leads to writing. It occurs everyday in my classroom with the Tools of the Mind play planning. The children are drawing their plans and through this process they are learning that they are expressing the thoughts and ideas from their mind through pictures. I feel that as they get older there is less focus on drawing and more pressure on writing. There are children who still find it easier to voice their thoughts through art and we can use their drawings as a lead to write.
ReplyDeleteLast semester I took a writing course at Hunter and I learned a lot about the process of writing. One idea that was suggested by my professor to continue to extend my Pre-Ks and their drawing is by providing them with a specific paper. The paper has three squares. It would teach the children about organizing their ideas and stories into beginning, middle and end. Then they would be able to create books placing their ideas on each page. Young children always have stories to share, but there is never enough time in a school day to listen to them. If they have the opportunity to create stories through drawing and book making we are providing them an outlet.
While working with a reluctant writer in our class during the Realistic Fiction Unit, I caught myself in the act of further alienating him from the writing process. This is a student who needs to be prompted sentence by sentence. He came up with a problem - the little brother annoys the big brother. I prompted him to give some examples - he always wants to play with him and his friends; he touches his things. He painstakingly writes these details and I prompt him again- what is the solution? I walk away to work with another student. When I return, he has written that the big brother kills the little brother with a great big THE END!!! (Exclamation points added by the student). He was so pleased to be finished and so pleased with his ending. When I read it aloud, he had a great big fit of laughing. And what did I do. . . . . . ? I asked him, in a serious teacher voice, "Come on now. Is that realistic? Do you think that would really happen?" His laughing stopped and his face fell. He knew I was going to ask him to change it, or to write more. He argued that it could happen and we got into a little debate about how feasible it was. I realized later that I could have just let it go. That story would be finished and he would start another, and we could work on making that one a little more realistic.
ReplyDelete(Don't know why is says my name is Lenny. It's Lenore writing.)
I wish I had Diego's journal in front of me right now, but I don't so I'll have to paraphrase: "One foggy, foggy afternoon, a gravedigger crept into a graveyard. Next, he just disappeared. . ." So starts one of Diego's stories from his journal that he wrote last month, during our journal writing unit in Writing Workshop. At the end of the month I asked
ReplyDeletestudents to choose a couple of their favorite journal entries, and flag them with a post-it. I photocopied all of them and put the collection into a book, "Diaries from the First Grade." (Many of them have read Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and we all read Diary of a Worm and Diary of a Wombat.) I made a few copies of their favorite entries and today we had a little publishing party for students to read their journal entries to friends, and read what others had written. There was a quiet buzz in the room as students circulated to different tables, but stayed absolutely still to hear a friend read. More than a couple of times I heard comments like "I love that. Can you read it again?"
Throughout the unit students were discovering new genres that they enjoyed, and some wrote a new genre every day. A list, a diary entry, a weather journal, a comic, a song.
The collection is a great snapshot into mid-year writing skills of first graders, and also into their little minds! Chloe wrote a list of "things I wish were real," Kira for the first time ever wrote a whole page (about her family) by herself without insisting she needed help, Michael wrote an adventure story about hunting, Grant penned the neatest and most thorough autobiography I've seen from a first grader, and so on.
Like Kristin mentioned already, we will keep up journal writing all year long. In our class I have promised the students we will have journal writing at least once a week regardless of our other studies. This experience has certainly helped me re-think a couple of the usual first grade writing units. I think it's important to teach genre, and ask students to write in different genres, but I hope not to lose sight of the importance of FUN in writing, as well as choice and humor, all which encourage students to find their unique voice as an author.
Let's provide time for our students to express their thoughts, feelings and emotions regularly through planned sessions of creative writing and let's also develop our knowledge of craft.
ReplyDeleteIn chapter 10 (p. 91) Fletcher discusses an eighth grade student writer who wanted to describe (in his writing piece)the smell of death that he experienced when his father shot and killed a deer while they were out hunting together. During the conference, writing consultant, Cyrene Wells helped the student to solve his writing problem. She questioned the writer,"How did his smell affect you and your father? How did you react? What did you do?"
The conference allowed the student time to think deeply and it gave Cyrene more insight about his experience. Cyrene: 1)understood and accepted the culture where deer hunting is respected, 2) asked great questions and she 3) applied her inside knowledge of craft by suggesting to this student, a way to show how the smell affected him and his father.
I believe EVCS teachers do a great job connecting to their students and they work hard to understand them...their likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. I have no doubt that teachers will be sensitive to boy writers who create writing that reflects their interests (even when it's far from their own!).
Fletcher reminds us that some boys are less cooperative than girls about revision work...they may resist revising...teachers should avoid those power struggles. It's not easy to know the right time to assist boy writers, and for some, it will be difficult to step back and just let them write...but if that's what they need, then that's what we must do.
While we push forward the creative writing process for students, teachers overall knowledge of craft must be well developed to adequately assist students when they come to the conference for guidance. What are our expectations, bottom lines, etc?