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Glen and Karen Bledsoe, Authors
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Home About Us Our Books Articles on Writing for Children Young Writers For Teachers Bookstore Links Site Map Glass Writer Writing Software The Sandbox: Writing Discussion Board Bookview: book reviews, our news, and more Contact information: Glen and Karen Bledsoe can be reached at: Book-specific teacher ideas: Chinese New Year Crafts Hanukkah Crafts	For Teachers Our best teaching tip: check out the National Writing Project, and find the location of your local Writing Project. Most offer Summer Institutes for teachers. The National Writing Project is all about "teachers teaching teachers," working to improve their own writing and pass on their love of writing to their students. How do you get students interested in writing? Glen teaches elementary school, and starts his year by talking to his students about his own writing. "I used to have these dreams when I was that age," he says, "And when I'd wake up, I'd write them down. I kept whole notebooks of dreams." He tells his students how he'd take his dreams and work them into stories, sometimes typing them up on an old typewriter. "Sometimes I'd really get going on a story, and I'd think, 'Wow, I've written twenty pages! That's almost a novel!'" He may also show students some of the work he's written and published. The purpose of this is to show students that writing isn't just a schoolroom exercise -- that writing is something that "real" people do, every day, and not just because someone tells them to. As a teacher, sharing your own writing experiences with students shows your students that writing isn't just something that you inflict on them, but is something that you do, too. A writing workspace Glen has students write in a dedicated writing notebook. It can be a spiral-bound notebook, but the ideal writing notebook is a good old-fashioned hard-cover composition book, the kind with the black and white mottled cover. The stiff card binding gives a firm writing surface so that students can write anywhere. These can be purchased cheaply in bulk at an office supply store and sold to students at cost. A writing notebook keeps all of a student's writing collected in one spot, instead of scattered about. Final work may be copied onto clean paper, but the notebook itself is a workspace where students can list ideas, work on ideas, and track their own writing. Much of what students write in their notebooks comes from their own ideas. When students own the idea, they are much more interested in writing about it than if they have a prompt or an idea assigned to them. They may balk at the idea of writing a story from the viewpoint of a tree when the teacher tells them to, but may happily write the story of a bug in that tree if it's their own idea to do so. Students use their writing notebooks every day. Unlike riding a bicycle, writing isn't something you learn once and never forget. The more you practice, the better you get at it, and writing daily helps develop whatever neural connections form during the act of creation and reinforces the connections. Word lists Before his students embark on a year of writing, Glen asks them what nouns are. Students start listing nouns, and he writes them on the board. At first they think of commonplace nouns, such as cat, dog, and chair. After they exhaust the obvious, they start thinking of more unusual things: lemon, aardvark, sofa. Then they'll do the same with verbs and adjectives. In the back of their writing notebooks, students keep lists of nouns, verbs, and adjectives so they always have lists of interesting words handy. The word list can be the point of departure for the first stories that his students write. Glen may ask students to pick a noun and and adjective from their list, and create a story around their choice, be it an invisible toilet or a freckled fishbowl. Because they have chosen their own silly combination, students usually have a good time writing about it. They also have an endless source of writing prompts of their own creation, so there's never a time when they can use "I don't know what to write about" as an excuse. See our new random writing prompt generator that uses the same idea! Modeling The students aren't the only ones writing in their notebooks during writing time. Glen carries his laptop to school and writes alongside them. He always has some project going, whether it's working on an assigned nonfiction book, or crafting a novel. Again, this shows that writing isn't just a schoolroom activity done to please the teacher, but is an activity that anyone can engage in for pleasure or as a profession. When students share their work, Glen sometimes shares some of his, too. Coffee House The most important writing activity that Glen uses is Coffee House, an idea he got from Dr. Robin Fromherz of Willamette University, originally as an interesting replacement for show and tell. In the days of the Beat poets, coffee houses were a place where poets would get up in front of a microphone and read their poetry aloud to an appreciative audience. Coffee House is a weekly activity in which students share their own writing by reading it aloud. The audience responds with applause or with a simple, "Thank you." Glen puts a tall stool in front of the room, and begins the first Coffee House of the year by sharing pieces from his own writing to model the process. Students may then volunteer to read something from their writing notebooks. No one has to share, but once Coffee House time is established, even shy students grow more and more eager to share their writing. Because there is no judgement and no critique, students feel safe. The purpose of Coffee House is to give students a larger audience for their writing. When their only audience is the teacher, the constant question is, "Is this good enough?" What they are asking is, "Have I written just enough to get a good grade? Have I done just enough of what the teacher wants?" When their audience is extended to a larger group, be it their own peers, their parents during Open House, or an even wider community via web publishing, text publishing, blogging -- or the state writing tests -- students learn to assess their own work. "Good enough" is no longer good enough. They strive to achieve the best because when the public is looking, they want to look good. Some students create long works, with an ongoing novel-length story that they share chapters or excerpts from during Coffee House time. Another teacher we know turned Coffee House into Cocoa House when parent volunteers in her class started bringing in cocoa and cookies, turning sharing time into a special event. Cowboy Bob and Zippy the Man from Mars Part of the teaching practice at Glen's school is Daily Oral Language, which is used to teach writing conventions. Teachers write several unpunctuated sentences on the board, and the class is asked to help place the punctuation and capitalizations correctly. There may also be noun-verb disagreements and other grammatical errors that students need to correct. Once the passage is finished, students copy it into their notebooks. But DOL can be a dull exercise if it uses dull sentences. Glen spiced it up by throwing away suggested sentences about "The boy played baseball" and replacing them with an ongoing story about Cowboy Bob and Zippy the Man from Mars. "I'm not sure how well students transfer this to their own writing," Glen says. "I'm still working on that part, and it would be interesting to study." Students do, however, pay closer attention to the exercise when the story is interesting and their teacher has made it up just for them. To help students transfer the DOL exercise to their own writing and editing, Glen sometimes asks students to volunteer some of their own writing for a class editing exercise. After removing the student's name from a writing sample, he puts it on an overhead and asks the class to help edit the work. Editing may begin with a DOL-style search for mistakes in punctuation, but may extend to more intensive critiques, with suggestions for rephrasing sentences or creating a more punchy ending. Writing to Learn Karen teaches college biology, and doesn't have as much opportunity to teach writing -- though her students often need considerable help in learning to organize and write reports without naively plagiarizing the whole thing from web pages! She does, however, use writing almost daily in class in the form of Writing to Learn exercises. Most Writing to Learn activities involve quick, informal writing to help students clarify their own ideas, uncover misconceptions, or organize new knowledge. One simple activity is the Think-Pair-Share. Karen may begin class with a question on the overhead ("How do you know if something is living or not?" "If a widow's peak hairline is a dominant trait, does that mean that someday all people will have a widow's peak hairline?") and ask students to write out their best answer. When class begins, students turn to one another, share their answers, and discuss them. Then when she's ready to ask students for their ideas, all students have something written in front of them to share. She may collect the papers as a quick assessment and misconceptions check. For more Writing to Learn ideas, download the Writing to Learn Handout that Karen uses when teaching Writing to Learn workshops. Writing to Learn and other forms of integrated writing are making their way into school curricula. One outstanding example is the Reading, Writing, and Rings curriculum developed by the Bay Area Writing Project in cooperation with NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Reading, Writing, and Rings is a language arts and science crossover curriculum that grew out of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. The materials can be downloaded for free. Karen attended a presentation of this curriculum at a National Writing Project conference and was impressed by the quality of the student work. One second-grader, when writing about Saturn as a pre-test, could barely get out a couple of wobbly sentences. By the end of the unit, the same second grader wrote out two whole pages -- and didn't want to stop!