A Love For Writing: Part II (Getting Started)
“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
― Jodi Picoult
Last week we talked about a few fun ways to relieve stress surrounding writing. If you missed it, you can catch up on that post here.
The next step, once your kiddo is primed to actually do some writing, is to let them create. This, of course, also allows you to see which part of the writing process is causing frustration.
Is it the mechanical aspect? Holding the pencil, fine/gross motor skill challenges, or handwriting?
Is it a processing or language struggle? Difficulty with organizing thoughts, coming up with vocabulary, thinking through relevant responses to the question or topic?
Is it the whole of reading, spelling, and grammar skills applied to writing? Knowledge and use of punctuation, misspellings of common words, sentence and paragraph structure?
The focus area in which to concentrate teaching efforts will depend on which of these is the cause of the struggle. But the way I begin is always the same. I explain to my students all the time that writing is a process. It’s not, for most people, just about scribbling down some words and ending up with the perfect story, essay, or report. For most students, I find that the most challenging aspect of writing tends to be just getting started. So, we have to slow that process down to ensure they understand writing can, and should, happen in steps. The cool thing about breaking it into steps is that it allows them to manage smaller tasks on their way to the big task. Those steps I jot down for them often are:
Topic, especially in early stages, is pretty straight forward. Most often, it’s assigned. A picture they have to describe, a book to write a summary of, a character to create, etc… Sometimes even that will require brainstorming. But the real challenge will come once they know what they’re writing about. Brainstorming and outlining are important to developing an idea. These steps are often overlooked, but my students will tell you we’ve proven that more time spent here, means less time required in the remaining steps. In many classrooms, or on standardized testing protocols it’s referred to as planning. Whatever you call it, the goal is to get the ideas out, and then organize them. All of this should happen before writing the essay. So how do we effectively flesh out an idea?
Well, first, we need an idea and a quick list: Let’s say I’ve been given a theme/topic of summer. I first need to get all the ideas in my head connected to this topic onto paper. It’s my brain dump (or brainstorm). It looks like this:
Summer
Sunshine, bright, sunglasses, pool, relax, hot day, park, green trees, grass, dogs, beach, ocean- wide/blue, volleyball, friends, play, vacation, trips, no school, sleep late, sleepovers.
Seems so random, right? Good! It’s because I didn’t edit my brainstorm list. I allowed my brain to do what it does - let one thought/idea lead to another. I wanted my ideas to pour out as they came. From that list I can decide which ideas I want to keep, and cross out those I don’t. Now I can outline my story.
In outlining, I can organize those ideas, and add detail to create a skeleton of my essay. In this step, we’re identifying key points, deciding on sequence, and building the flow. A really popular graphic organizer that is used for this purpose would be a Hamburger Outline. Now, this format works best for a single paragraph, but there are also those created for multi-paragraph essays. An outline like this also has the fun element that is great for students, and not intimidating. See photo below for my quick sketch :).
The most helpful thing about graphic organizers is that they model structure for us, which means less work and less frustration. But knowing what to put in a graphic organizer is where the struggle tends to be, which is why I separate the brainstorm task from the outlining task. Again, more small tasks building to the big one. Brainstorming is so helpful to prove that a student does, in fact, “have an idea of what to write”, which negates their response to the contrary, when given a topic.
Between brainstorming and outlining, a student has essentially written their entire story. They have seen it in their head, seen it laid out on paper, and are now ready to put those short notes into full sentences. We’re still not concerned about the structure of the sentences, or their choice of wording, or even repetition that is likely happening in their sentence starters or transition words. Guess which step we’ll focus on that? You got it, EDITING! Once they’re stronger writers they’ll learn to catch certain mistakes as they’re writing, and correct them. But for now, when writing, we’re just writing! When we edit, we’ll really edit. That’s a whole different post, because it’s a totally different step. So, as suggested last week, have story time, and hopefully, at least a little bit of fun!
Happy writing!
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