Writing Lessons

I implemented a new lesson format for my students last week. We first have a lesson about a specific skill and practice it a bit. Then, we write. The first day, I set the timer for 8 minutes and everyone diligently wrote. We had a few people share, then we evaluated them to see if they had successfully utilized the skill, and several of them did. The next day, the writing time was extended to 16 minutes, and then the following day we had 21 minutes set aside for writing. Finally, on Friday, we practiced how to be effective in a writer's conference with a partner, so several people read and we used our skills. We then had partners working together to implement the conferencing. (We had a four-day week...Labor Day.)

The concept for these first lessons is to choose a small "seed idea" not a large "watermelon" topic. Instead of talking about your whole soccer season, choose a moment from a game or practice in which something happened that you can make a little movie in your mind, and then retell, step-by-step. To generate these seed ideas, the students were to first think of a person, then list under that person's name three incidents they could think of that occurred with him or her. Another day, we wrote the name of a place, and the third day, we wrote about a thing. These are just ways to help them to think of specific incidents to recount, rather than a general topic that is broad and their story may then just degenerate into a list of items concerning it. We're trying to be story tellers--it is a personal narrative unit.

The fun part for me is that I, too, am supposed to write. I circulate around the room at first and check to see that people have been able to think of something. Then, I sit and use my own examples (which are on the board) and, in my writer's notebook, I write while the timer ticks away. If a person "finishes" they are to choose another of their incidents and start a new story. "Done" isn't part of the deal here. One should be always writing--either generating or revising--during our writing time. I'm liking it so far. Here is one of my small ideas:

Place: the beach---

It was like being on a cloud. I was floating on the green cool ocean along the edge of Carpenteria State Beach. It's one of my favorite places in the world. The oak-covered mountains loomed into the sky to the east. The dim outline of Santa Cruz Island was visible through the misty clouds hovering off-shore. I was suspended in between, drifting and bobbing like a piece of human seaweed. I could faintly hear the surf splashing as it landed on the sand. I could hear laughter and shrieking from people using body boards or just frolicking in the the wave break. But all the noise was far away as my body dipped and rose with the moving ocean. As I gazed around, a dark form appeared above me and I was astounded to see a pelican crash, bill-first, straight into the water not 10 feet from me. He was such a perfect arrow shape that his body hardly made a splash. He disappeared entirely into the water and then almost immediately popped back up--swallowing a fish I could see outlined through the skin on his throat. He floated there serenely, looking at me, blinking, not caring that I shared his watery feed ground. I was simply one more small creature in the vast Pacific Ocean.