'Write what you know' doesn't mean writers are
limited to writing just what they know. It means they use their life experience to
provide details or as a sort of jumping off point for their writing. My
Life Among The Aliens, A Year With Butch
And Spike, and Club Earth are all
full of examples of writing from children's experiences. They can be used in a writing
program to help explain that concept to children and to give them something to use as a
model for their own writing. Is the chapter about Halloween in Butch
and Spike just about a bunch of funny things that happen at Halloween or is it
also about a boy who needs to lighten up in order to start enjoying himself? Is the
baseball chapter just about a baseball game or is it also about learning that following
the rules can mean hurting someone else? Classroom Timelines or Journals:
All self-respecting kids will tell you that they can't write from their own
experience because they have no experience, nothing ever happens to them. Be prepared to
show them they are wrong! Start keeping a timeline for the class. Do it any way you want
to--from ceiling to floor or all around the room or any other way you can think of. Put it
in a place that's easy to get to or add on to. Then jot down events that occur in the
class as they happen: field trips, parties, special projects, visitors to the classroom,
etc. Be sure to include the more interesting things like outbreaks of head lice, the
toilet in the boys' room overflowing, and equipment failures. Do it as a class. You be the
initiator, but let your students know that if something comes up that they want to
include, they can.
If a timeline seems too unwieldy, keep one journal for the whole class. A lot of
kids hate keeping journals, so you keep this one for them. This will be an idea journal
not a tell-me-your-deepest-secrets journal. Put it in a good-sized notebook of some kind
that won't get lost in the classroom. Enter the same kind of material you would have put
on the timeline. You can also include newspaper clippings regarding local events--fires,
celebrities coming to town, etc. Again, you do the initiating, but let your students know
they can come up with ideas, too.
When you are ready to assign writing, your students can turn to the classroom
timelines or journals for material.
A Couple Of Writing Assignments:
Your Life Among The Aliens: Tell
your students to take one of the events from the timeline or journal and combine it with
the arrival of an alien of some sort. Bring an alien along on a class trip or have one
help out with a science project.
A Year With (student's name): Tell
your students to take one of the events from the timeline or journal and throw in some
rough and rowdy kids to create a chapter in their own Year With book. Or if they
want to, they can eliminate the rough and rowdy kids and just do their own perspective on
something that happened. Their chapter can be from the book A
Year With Allison or Kyle or …
Brainstorming:
Do you have students who still say they can't do this, that they can't get from
an idea to a story? Brainstorm with the class. Even if you feel that your students are old
enough and experienced enough to write on their own, take them at their word and back up
in the writing process. It's possible they truly can't make the leap from idea to product.
Or it's possible they'll enjoy brainstorming enough that they'll be left with some
enthusiasm for the job ahead. Keep generating ideas until you've created an outline
together. Just because everyone has the same outline, it doesn't mean their stories will
be identical. In fact, it could be very interesting to see what the different writers in
your class do with this same material.
Don't feel you're wasting time brainstorming. Writing doesn't occur when marks
are made on paper. It's done in the writer's head. Getting it on paper comes later, it's
just the mechanism for communicating.
