paus(ed): If you build it, they will write.

Tags

creative writing, journaling, scaffolded learning, writing, writing prompts, writing skills

Here’s an example of the kinds of work students contributed to the stuck box.

My Stuck Bucket (I wrote about it earlier this week in the Daily Discomfort) is a self-made scaffold.  Everyone needs a strategy for getting unstuck, and that’s what a scaffold is, really, just a hand up, a means of moving further up the writing road. Here are the types of things I put in my stuck bucket.

• The list of potential topics I made before I started blogging, all cut up, so I can pull out one at a time. Some of the things on the list have already made their way onto the blog, so I’m not putting those in.
• Ticket stubs from events I’ve enjoyed with loved ones.
• I love buying old photos at antique stores.  I like it even better if the antique store is really cluttered and junky.  That’s where you find the best stuff.
• Maps from trips we’ve taken.
• A candy wrapper I found when I went to get the mail.
• Notes people have written me. (Write me a note and I’ll put it in my Stuck Bucket.)

When I was in the classroom, I put many scaffolds in place for student journaling.  For the first two or three weeks of school, students worked to put resources in their journals.  These included brainstorming activities about people in their lives, places, important objects, and animals.  The brainstorming was written in (or glued into) the journals, and students were free to pull from those tools anytime they had nothing to write about in journals.  Since I asked students to write for five minutes every day about the topic of their choice, this scaffold helped minimize the number of I-Don’t-Know-What-To-Write abouters.

Although I didn’t call it a Stuck Bucket, I also had a big box in the front of my room that we added artifacts to every couple of weeks. It contained many of the same types of items I’ve put in my own stuck bucket. If I went somewhere interesting over the weekend, I brought an artifact and showed it to the class, speaking about it briefly before putting it in the box. The students sometimes asked to add artifacts, and they were welcomed.

In addition, we added artifacts related to the language skills my students needed. For example, when I noticed my students didn’t know parts of speech, we read Ruth Heller’s beautifully illustrated series on parts of speech.  Students would then write their own interesting adjective, adverb, noun, prepositional phrase, etc. on three by five cards and decorate them. Those cards then became a part of our collection of artifacts.  Even though they had resources right in the front of their journals, I was able to use the big box as a means of encouraging students to transfer discreet language skills to their own writing.   It also gave my wigglers a chance to get up and stretch their legs while finding something to write about.

 I’ve spoken to many teachers about giving students the opportunity to write about whatever they want, and most of the time, the teacher’s response is, “My students would never be able to do that.”

To that I say, Poppycock!  Yes, they can! Just give them the scaffolds they need, and be patient.  You’ll be surprised at the interesting, important, and unique ways they view the world.  This daily five minutes will enrich your student’s lives.  Write with them, and it will enrich your own.

Here are some mentor texts you could use to develop student journal artifacts:

• Parts of Speech: Ruth Heller’s Parts of Speech books.
• Alliteration:  Animalia by Graham Base
• Onomatopoeia: Batman Videos from YouTube
• Personification: The Day the Crayons Quit, by Drew Daywalt
• Conjunctions:  Just Me and 6,000 Rats, by Rick Walton
• Hyperbole:  You Don’t Always Get What You Hope For by Rick Walton
• Antonyms: Straight and Curvy, Meek and Nervy by Brian P. Cleary
• Homonyms and Homophones: How Much Can a Bare Bear Bear?  By Brian P. Cleary
• Similes and Metaphors:  Skin Like Milk, Hair of Silk By Brian P. Cleary

I taught sixth grade, but if you teach a higher grade, don’t let that stop you from reading these great children’s books if you see they will quickly demonstrate a language skill that you notice students need to develop more fully.  It’s a painless way to reinforce the learning and the students will love it.

paus(ed): No Pain, No Brain

Tags

Conceptual Learning, Education, Learning Theories, Procedural Learning, scaffolded learning

Do you remember when you first learned how to hit a baseball?  The first time you held a bat in your hand, you were probably six or seven.  Unless you were a kinesthetic genius, you didn’t hold the bat the correct way the first time you tried to use it.  Remember how frustrated you felt when someone tried to take the bat away from you to show you what you were doing wrong? What you wanted was time to learn how to do it yourself.  Any number of people could have told you the procedure to use in order to hit a ball with a bat.  However, the only way to learn to hit a ball was to try, again and again.

In order to hit a ball with a bat, a person has to know more than procedure.  They have to understand the concept of how to hold the bat, how to swing the bat, the plane that the bat comes across, and how fast to swing the bat in order to make contact.  In order to build that conceptual knowledge, you have to take what you’ve been told about procedure and practice it until the concepts behind hitting a ball take hold in your brain.  Once you have conceptual knowledge, you can hit a baseball with a baseball bat repeatedly, for your whole life.  Without conceptual knowledge, you have to re-learn the procedures of hitting every time you pick up a bat.

In his book, Concept Rich Mathematics Instruction, author Meir Ben Hur states that when we build conceptual knowledge we actually adjust our schema, creating physical changes in our brains!    Here is a link you can follow to read more of what he says about this.   http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/106008/chapters/Conceptual-Understanding.aspx  

I’m still in the pre-amoebic phase of learning about social media.  I have a cursory procedural knowledge of the buttons to push to make pictures or video appear, but I don’t know why I’m pushing those buttons.  I don’t know how portions of the internet, like facebook and pinterest, relate to one another.  And forget html.  What’s that?  Somebody poked me the other day and I had a serious moment.  Am I supposed to poke back or what?  In order to change my brain, I have to keep trying new applications related to social media.  I have to think about how those applications relate to one another. I want that new brain, because I know that without sufficient conceptual knowledge, I won’t be able to grow this blog, or sustain it as social media changes.

It took time for me to learn how to hit a baseball, and learning how to blog will take time as well. Teachers have students forty-eight minutes a day, five days a week for nine months.  We have a mountain of objectives that our States expect us to teach.  However, my teacher buds, try to remember that the only way to learn how to hit a baseball is to hold the bat yourself, miss the ball multiple times, and continually try until the process becomes automatic.  Ask yourself this question: Who is holding the bat in my classroom?