Harvesting The Joy of 3rd Grade Writers, Invited To Hear Author's Chair of Insightful Personal Narratives at Middlebrook

For the last few months, I've been providing professional development on narrative, informative, and opinion writing in K-5 schools for teachers, support staff, and students. Included in this work has been model lessons and a few weeks back I had the opportunity to work with Amanda Schaeffer's class at Middlebrook. The topic was getting "unstuck" when writing narratives and composing on topics that matter to us.

A few weeks following, I did a workshop for teachers on thinking like a comic illustrator and storyteller, blocking one idea at a time.

The hard work paid off, because yesterday I was invited to hear drafts of student work and was able to see how the young people went from a seed in the library model lesson, to further development in comic strip forms, to a finished product - 22 personal narratives. The kids wrote about gymnastics, video gaming, basketball, skiing, engineering, monsters under the bed, friends, and even trips to Targets. I was impressed by the originality, the consistent development, and the ability to maintain audience awareness in all that they wrote.

My favorite line of the day came from Luke who described a time he was having a very rough day and his parents took him to Targets to pick out a toy. At first he didn't know why he was brought to the parking lot of the store he detests. He wrote,

I discover that we were going to Target. "Ugggggh," I moaned and I went back to my blue mood [he was angry about falling off of a slide and having a slight concussion]. What do my parents need now that will be totally useless to me? I jumped out of the car. I dragged my feet to the ground. Why do parking lots have to be so large?

Luke went on to narrate a story about walking into a store full of what he hates most, PEOPLE! and how every time his family enters Targets they run into people they know, which is super boring. Ah, but his parents brought him to Targets to allow him to pick out a gift to put him in a better mood.

Legos always cheer me up no matter what situation I'm in. There are so many different kinds of them, but my personal favorites are the city. There are so many sets that you can build! They have police stations and fire trucks and so many other things (but for Christmas, I'm hoping to get the giant spaceship).

I was highly impressed by all the young writers: their details, their use of imagery, the million dollar words they used, but most importantly the originality.

I brought my signature pirate-eye patches and admitted to Luke, "Yes, I got them at Targets." (Seriously, his essay would make the greatest commercial, as his disgust for being there was totally overturned when he got to pick out a Lego toy). I asked the kids to ARGH-ue about 10 important writerly things they learned from hearing one another's essays. These kids came up with 12 and I felt like I was working with doctoral students. They were brilliant.

So much of what we do in life simply disappears and we never know the effects we have. Yesterday, however, I learned that my few hours of working with teachers and kids paid off. I was so proud of the young writers, their teacher Amanda, and their district for hiring CWP-Fairfield to explore new ways for teaching writing. I only hope such success is spreading throughout all the schools I'm working with.