Writer's Block

As I pecked away at my laptop in a Southtown coffee shop, I spotted someone at a nearby table with writer's block. It was painful to watch. He just sat there with an upright, motionless pen and that familiar, strained look. In contrast, last night, my son came flying through our front door, scrambling for a pen, "I just thought of the best lyrics. I gotta get this down."

As a teacher of writing, I realize that some days are the former and some the latter.

Tips for the unmotivated:

• Tell your kids about stream of consciousness. Tell them just to write what's in the brain and try to make sense out of it afterwards or see where it takes them. Think of all of the conversations you've had where you went off on a tangent. During shared reading, my students like to interject with their connections to the text and I always find that we eventually get way off the subject. This would be a great time to show them how stream of consciousness works and how really good ideas are generated from such routes. One of my students tried it last week and his piece ended up very Seuss-ish. He got a kick out of that!

• Provide choices. Students need room to wiggle both physically and mentally. Give them choices. This doesn't mean always give them free choice; that can cause a lot of "I don't know what to write." Give them two or three prompts like Tell me about a time when you were proud of yourself or someone else. Not: One rainy day, the clown was at the circus and then.... Think about how much you've put in that scene. What if rainy days remind the student of something sad? What if he or she has never been to the circus? What if she's like me and gets really freaked out by clowns? (I do have Free Choice Friday, though.)
  

• Write when they write and share your own moments of brain freeze, even if you have to fake it. "Today I started to write about the time my mom won a marathon, but then I started to think about my son's birthday, which is tomorrow, and I got distracted. I'll write more tomorrow." Show them that writer's block is OK once in a while.
  

• Cut out pictures from a magazine (and laminate them if you want them to last for a while). Place these pictures in a box and students can choose a setting or a character or something else to which they've connected. "My dad once took me fishing..." Try to get pictures from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds. This could be a great way to dispel stereotypes and/or discuss the media's intentions.

• Keep examining text from the writer's perspective when you read with your kids. The more they think about the writer, the more they'll rely on some of those choices when they're writing.

• Keep providing those experiences for them. They can only write what they know. Stick them in front of a TV all day, and they're passively taking it all in. We want active learners with lots of experiences to draw from for their writing, not this:
  

A colleague shared a fun idea at our Differentiated Instruction cohort meeting. She took photos of her students in various poses, cut out their silhouettes, and told them to place these cut-outs in any setting they wanted. She reported that they were fully engaged and that the activity revealed a lot about their interests and their memories. Her next step is to have them write the memory or the story they've created in this setting.

In studying map skills, students in my class wrote Where I'm From poems. They were instructed to use repetition as their poetic tool and to share Texas facts. They also had to have one line include one of the vocabulary terms from the map skills section.

Example:
Where I'm from, the pecan tree is the state tree.
Where I'm from, there are nine counties.
Where I'm from is north of the equator.
Where I'm from, they dress like cowboys.
Where I'm from, there's a lot of Mexican food.
Where am I from? Texas, the second biggest state in the U.S.

or Texas, the lone star state, etc. You get the point. Some of them rhymed and a few were quite touching. Today they typed them in the computer lab and added clip art!

Let me tell you something about my first week of teaching fourth grade. This week I read to my fourth graders a few chapters from Esme Caudill's Sing A Song of Tuna Fish. Each detailed chapter begins with "Let me tell you something about...". I asked my students to use this prompt to share something about themselves that they would like for me and/or their classmates to know. The something could be about a person close to them, a memory, their favorite pastime. What they produced was quite telling. Just the topic each child chose told volumes about their personality: my dad, how I learned to skateboard better, our family trip, the cat my mom gave away without telling me, Paris, potatoes. Yes, one child wrote about her summer trip to Paris and how confusing it was not to speak the language and how there were language booths to visit to get translations and another child wrote about his favorite food "ever" and drew brown ovals all over the page. I was really impressed by two of my young writers. One effectively used similes and they both were skilled at "exploding the moment" (a Barry Lane term).
I bought 23 white ten-cent folders at H-E-B and had them label them as their Writing Portfolios and decorate them. We'll monitor progress over the year and choose which pieces we'll polish with the writing process. My new colleague also shared Six-Word Memoirs with me. See the following website for some student samples: http://www.smithmag.net/sixwordbook/sixword-storybook/. This activity was a lot of fun. If you have trouble turning the page, click at the very bottom and drag. The teeny-tiny very bottom of the right page. It's tricky.

My six-word attempt:
Teaching writing delivers me from monotony.

Word of the Week
arriviste (noun) one that is a new and uncertain arrival (as in social position or artistic endeavor)

Would an administrator warn the arriviste out of concern or to light a fire under her?
She'll never know.

What's A Clerihew?

It's a poem with four lines.
The last word of the first line is a person's name or another proper noun.
The second line must rhyme with the first line.
The third and fourth lines rhyme, also.
AABB
Sample:

Gotta love that metal head Kane
Even when he drives me insane
His dimples make me sigh
He's such a cutie pie



OK... so he doesn't always smile.
He's fourteen.

Yesterday, I joined Brenner for his interview at a local charter school. The brick three-story building is nearly 90 years old. As he ingratiated himself with the VP, I explored the "condemned" second floor. I expected tiny ghosts to lure me in to be the teacher that they've so patiently awaited all these years. As I cautiously shuffled along the ruined hardwood floors, I realized that I was snooping in an area that wasn't used for storage like all the other rooms. As I tried to exit, the loud creaking floorboards sparked visions of my crashing through to the first floor, landing in Brenner's khaki lap just as he answered, "What do you have to offer our school?"
Two whole floors are condemned, crammed in sections with every literacy and numeracy program that was adopted and neglected over the past twenty years. And what about all of the air conditioning seeping out to nowhere from the stairwell? I wanted to call a home improvement show. Kids are in those character-void portables in the back, taking up more of their free space, because the school does not have money to renovate and refurbish this treasure. Was I in New Orleans again?

Word of the Week

malapropism (noun): a usually humorous misuse of a word or phrase

Idol Worship

I met up with some teacher friends at Casbeers this morning. Casbeers is, as of quite recently, housed in an old Catholic church in the middle of Southtown. Once a month, there' s a jazz brunch. An eight- member band named Earfood plays upstairs on the stage while the "parishioners" sip Bloody Mary's in the pews, toe-tapping and finger snapping. Two of my colleagues know Neesie, who sings for the band. She's actually a former teacher at our school. Her booming, soulful voice flows smoothly out of her petite frame, dressed in regular ol' teacher attire. Ya just never know about a person.

I didn't know until today who one of her closest friends happens to be. As we ate our brunch, Suzanne called over to a woman dressed in white linen, whose long salt and pepper hair sat loosely in a pony tail.
"Naomi! Hi!"
I don't even remember their exchange. I saw what appeared to be a nice lady smiling over at Suzanne and continued to fork my scrambled eggs.
Once this Naomi person returned to her seat, Suzanne asked me, "Do you know who that was?" as if she were passing me a wrapped present.
I assumed it was someone's mother or so-and-so's first wife, something juicy by that look she gave.
I was not prepared for what she did reveal:
"That's Naomi Nye."
I nearly choked. I'm crazy about Naomi Nye. Her poetry is real and it's alive.
I had pictured her entirely different, so I wanted to check her out in some sort of unobtrusive manner. I had the misfortune of sitting with my back to her. I must have turned just to look at her a dozen times.
She later sat two pews in front of ours and I watched her shoulders rock to the rhythm and wondered how the poet perceived this church gig. How would she describe the echoes? the stained glass windows? Neesie joked between songs that the band should sing Rutabaga-Roo, one of Naomi's songs for kids.
Oh, there was a poet in our midst! I was star-stricken! Ultimately, I failed to introduce myself, afraid that words would fail me as I stood before the poet Naomi Shihab Nye.
I know someone who knows someone who knows Naomi Nye. That's good enough... for now.

Hidden
By Naomi Shihab Nye


If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone has
swallowed it.
If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words.
No one sees
the fuel that feeds you.

History of Six Traits

Stunning! I've spent the past three days in Lincoln City, Oregon at the lovely Salishan Resort for the NWREL Training for Trainers of the 6+1 Traits. Kane and I lodged amidst majestic evergreens that emitted an intoxicating fragrance. The days were sunny with temperatures 55-65 degrees and the nights were a chilly 50 or below. It's July! Leaving here is...
I think I have a bit of a crush on this town.



We visited two light houses, spotted seals playing right about where that large structure stands near the shore (in the first pic), experienced a pretty frightening hike through the woods, munched on fish and chips at a local dive (turns out we do like cod fish... a lot), collected driftwood, shopped along the historical Newport Bayfront, and today we visited downtown Portland, which we like equally as much for completely different reasons. We need more time to explore eclectic, fresh city. We found Powell's Books, "the largest independent used and new bookstore in the world". It would take a full day just to completely journey through this place!

Alas, we're now lodging in a Days Inn near the Airport. Our flight home is scheduled for early tomorrow morning. All good things..
But, what I gained from the workshop is endless. Thanks to our materials and our activities and to the extensive practice of scoring the traits, I am fully prepared to present this information to my colleagues.

Six Traits History:

(In the words of Sophia Petrillo) Picture it. Northwest Region of US 1980's. Teachers were scoring student papers holistically or were deriving writing grades from standardized tests, which really didn't assess a student's ability to write. So, they got together, discussed what makes writing effective, researched other educators with similar concerns, and pinpointed it to six traits: Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, and Conventions. The process of assessment continued into the 90's and the 6+1 Trait Model was developed.
The Plus One is Publishing, which is important for the reader of a piece, but doesn't qualify as a full-fledged trait on its own. The Model is built upon the use of rubrics for assessment and on incorporating rich literature as models of effective writing in the instruction cycle.

6+1 Traits is a model of writing, not a program.

6+1 Traits does not replace the writing process. It is the content of the writing.

6+1 Traits helps students to grow as writers. If they struggle with one trait, they can still shine in another instead of receiving one overall grade with no explanation or guidance on how to develop as a writer.

Lighthouse print by Roger Bansemer

Word of the Week

panegyric (noun): a eulogistic oration or writing, also: formal or elaborate praise.