Realizing My Reluctant Writer Is Actually An Enthusiastic One
This year started 4th grade for us. Lyla has always been a reluctant writer. A lover of books, a listener of audiobooks well beyond her reading or grade level, and the owner of a pretty awesome imagination. However, the task of taking what was in her head, and getting it to paper, seemed to overwhelm her to a point of stopping her before she ever got started. To her defense, we hadn’t really taught story writing skills up to this point. Have you ever tried to teach a perfectionist a new skill that required them to realize they are doing things wrong, and do it anyway? It was a battle I just didn’t have in me.
However, last spring I excitedly ordered new curriculum, and planned our 4th grade year with high hopes of focusing on writing. And then our twice a month enrichment day finally solidified their plans. And, it included a writing class. I was excited, someone else was going to slay this dragon! And, as most parents know, kids seem to behave differently for someone that isn’t Mom or Dad. They find a new sense of control for their emotions. And then, in September, the first writing assignment came home.
That was it. Just an assignment. They had 1 month to complete it, no classes in between. No help or instruction from the teacher.
This class ranged from 8-12 year old. There was no going over the writing process. No teaching how to brainstorm. No story boards. No story elements. And, to make matters worse, the first writing prompt was to write a sales pitch for a video game they had to design.
It went about as well as you’d expect. There were a lot of tears at home (from both of us). At one point, we considered just not showing up for the writing class and resuming the intended writing instruction at home. But, we trudged through it, and she passed in something she was glad to be done with, but not proud of her outcome. And honestly, I don’t blame her. Both the glad to be done, and the not proud of the outcome. She had visions of stories in her head like what she reads at home and listens to on road trips. Rich language, vivid imagination, characters who battled their demon and came out victorious. But alas, this was not that. This was handing a late middle school marketing project to a 4th grader, and expecting them to love it rather than get overwhelmed.
And so came October, where there was a choice of prompts. I couldn’t tell you about the ones she didn’t pick, but the one she did get, was roll a story. There were 5 categories that needed each needed to be satisfied. Main character, secondary character, time, place and problem. Each category had 6 choices under it. You rolled the die, once for each column, and the number you rolled determined what satisfied that column.
She came home, prepared to try this again, but, annoyed that she couldn’t take her story where her imagination took her as she started writing, because she was trapped into specific characters. And so, I ripped away the finite rules. I said, “here’s the deal, I don’t care what grade you get on this, provided you try. If part of the grade is that you use the exact things you roll, you run the chance she’s going to give you a bad grade on it. However, that grade means nothing in this house. It means nothing in your portfolio this year. It means nothing to anything other than the person who gave it to you. So, if you would like to go outside of this box, and you’re willing to not have a melt down should she come back and say you failed the assignment, then leave the box. My only condition is that I would like you to stay with the spirit of the assignment. And that is Halloween themed, and you need to have something that fits within each category. So, if you’re secondary character doesn’t match anything on the list below, but you have one. That’s fine. I want you to create something you’re proud of. Something that ignites a fire in your soul to want to write again. But I don’t care if your character is a witch, or goblin, or ghost or a pumpkin that came to life. It could be a pair of talking haunted pants for all I care.
And then, I pulled out the white boards. The first was a brain dump of ideas. Who/what she wanted to use to satisfy the categories. What’s going to happen to them? What could their problem be? Is there a solution? I asked open ended questions and let her answers flow.
Next step, the flow chart. We have a large dry erase flip book I bought from Target’s deal section last year. It’s filled with charts and graphs and such that you can use. The flow chart was literally boxes with arrows connecting them. And so, we began to fill them in. Where does our main character start? I see we have haunted house, let’s put this a few boxes down. Now, how are we going to connect our main character to the haunted house? How do they get there? Do they have any troubles along the way? Our problem, they get locked in a room in the haunted house. Again, let’s put that a few boxes away. Now, fill in the empty ones. What happens once they get to haunted house that makes them get trapped in the room? And so, we continued on like this. Leaving spaces in between events we knew were going to happen, to fill in how the events linked to one another.
Next stop, writing. Her ideas flowed so much faster than she could write. So, we pulled up the Chromebook. We have a Chrome Cast plugged into an HDMI port on our TV. It allowed me to cast my computer screen to the TV while we curled up on the couch with snacks. I had her give me simple sentences for each box.
The girls went trick or treating.
They came upon a haunted house.
They rang the doorbell.
They were sucked into the house.
They found a room and got trapped inside.
A ghost appeared.
He shared 3 riddles with them that would help them escape.
They solved the riddles.
They ran back home and went to bed.
I had her read it aloud. Then I asked, “Does what you just read make you feel the same way the stories by Chris Colfer do? Can you envision it in your head? Do you see the movie behind your eyes as you listen to this?”
“No.”
Alright, let’s add detail. And so, I started asking more open ended questions, and typed her answers.
“What are the girls names? What are they wearing? This room they find. What makes them go into that room instead of a different one? Does the door stand out? What does it look like?”
More answers spill out.
“We use ‘they’ a lot in this set up. This is called repetition. What else can we use in place of they?”
So began the mini lesson on the thesaurus and a repeat lesson on synonyms.
For an entire month, about 2 times a week, we would continue on like this, for about half an hour or so at a time. Spending a day detailing what the 3 riddles were. It was easier to think of what would be in this house that we could find an answer for, and then figure out a riddle for the item. Once we had the 3 riddles, we could elaborate on how they solved them.
Could we add in dialogue? Excellent. How do we differentiate that so we know that people are talking with one another? So came the min lesson on quotations. What are other ways we can say, “Sarah said.” Let’s look at some random pages from some of our favorite books and see how they handle their dialogue.
And by the end of that month, she was BEAMING with pride in her story. When the day came to pass it in she said, “I don’t even care if I get a bad grade. I learned so much writing this, and I’m so happy with how it came out!” She strolled into enrichment day and yanked the story out of her backpack and ran to her friends, asking if she could read it to them.
I adore that we home school. But, there is something to be said for the peer writing process. I had some amazing teachers in elementary school who started a passion for writing in me. I think anything can be fun for a kid, when taught in such a way that works for them.
She left class at the end of that day, excited about her prompt for the following month, and begging me to sit down and begin the process again as soon as we got home. And I can’t wait to share with you what this one turns out to be. If you’re interested in seeing the final result, check out The Riddle Room over on Lyla’s Lair.
