It never fails. Whenever I visit my mother for a few days, I make my way to the basement bookcases. A bouquet of old stain, pine and mildewed pages welcomes me as I peruse my fondest childhood memories that line the shelves. Each time it seems that one or two books find special notice, and most recently it was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a hardcover, beautifully illustrated first edition I used to carry around everywhere. The writing in those pages took me inside the most interesting factory I’d ever known, introduced me to a lovable, eccentric candy maker, even helped me taste the scent of chocolate that antagonized Charlie’s desperate hunger. When I was done reading it, I still held that book close. Dahl’s words drew me in to Charlie’s story, and I didn’t want to leave. Words that writers choose and how they use them have power. Children can learn to fashion words to tantalize their readers as well. Word Choice Two fundamental parts of speech can create wonderful imagery for the reader: adjectives and verbs. Most kids understand adjectives to be describing words, and it is important that they learn how to create sensory images using adjectives. However, adjectives can also be used in other ways. When I write, “My mother was somehow prepared for the news, her lined face, stoic,” we are drawn to and impacted by the last two words because of stoic’s unexpected placement after the noun. Likewise, C.S. Lewis writes, “It was a desolate, featureless sort of country mainly devoted to cabbage and turnips, with poor hedges and few trees.” The use of “poor” to describe hedges is another unexpected use of an adjective that evokes a different image than bare or ugly. Therefore, adjective choice and order can affect the reader. Let’s also not forget the delights of a good verb: “Then Jonathan went tramping to the gate, his boots making big footprints in the snow” (The Bears of Hemlock Mountain by Alice Dalgliesh). The verb tramping evokes the sense of an over-bundled child trudging happily through the snow, something that wouldn’t come through with a verb like walked. Finally, children love funny and unusual words and often enjoy making up their own to describe something. Professional writers do as well. Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Room had trees and bushes that were “eatable” after all, and Out of the Silent Planet’s Ransom did not have a “man-of-the-world air.” With these techniques, children will welcome the freedom to let their inventive sides shine. Special Effects Just like movies use special methods for creating visual and audio displays, a writer sometimes needs to move beyond the standard grammar rules to create an image or feeling. Figurative language is one of those special effects writers use. Simile, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and hyperbole are four of these techniques that children of any age can learn to some extent. Metaphor is useful as well but is best introduced after second grade. Another special effect is using styled sentences. A long-winded sentence, one that seems to go on and on, can convey excitement, frenzy, or drifting thoughts. When Esperanza describes her mother’s hair in The House on Mango Street, the reader feels carried away with her reflections because of the long-winded sentence structure. Now most people learned that they should always write complete sentences and that paragraphs should be at least five sentences long. Hogwash. A well-placed fragment can get the reader’s attention and emphasize or echo an idea. Felicia McSweeney (age 11) artfully places a fragment in “Beautiful Night:” “Every time I lifted my head up to breathe in the salty air I noticed how beautiful the moonlight caught the waves, how the symphony of the ocean crashing against the rock was so enchanting. And then silence.” This final fragment gets the readers’ attention, takes them from one emotional state to another. A fragment isn’t the only one liner that works. A one-sentence paragraph also draws attention and underscores. Poor Mr. Popper spends nearly three pages on the phone explaining and re-explaining his penguin problem to city officials, each time being transferred from one bureau to another. “He decided to hang up.” I’m sure we can all relate to his situation. The tension and frustration that builds up over the three pages is released in that final one-line paragraph. Other Punctuation Punctuation is like glue—it connects our ideas (but I bet you knew that). Want to make a side comment to the reader? Use parenthesis like I just did or dashes work as well. The latter acts like a blinking arrow on a highway saying, “Pay attention to what’s coming up,” as it did in the first sentence of this paragraph. The same effect can be made with colons, which are also useful for other things: showing an example (like we are right now), and expressing thoughts or dialogue. And last but not least, the elusive three little dots. The ellipsis is often mistakenly used in place of a comma, but used correctly, it conveys a lost train of…. What was I writing? Oh yes, a lost train of thought, a continuing idea or action, or a loss for words. There are related topics also worthy of teaching including those that deal with organization and tone, such as genre studies. Of course, the basics should always come first, such as general sentence and paragraph structure, basic punctuation, and the parts of speech (at least to have a common vocabulary with which to discuss writing). These four are like the hammer and screwdriver in a toolbox. They’re fundamental. While word choice, special effects and other punctuation are like a miter saw or drill. They can help children expand and refine their creations.
Homeschooling
Teach Writing with Focused Reading
When I first started homeschooling, I spent days scouring the Internet for ideas on teaching writing, and whoa, was I hit with barrages of information. It was overwhelming for sure, but I managed to weed out some good ideas. The frustrating part was that most of what I found was just that—concepts, with little to no guidance in how to apply them at home with my children. Consequently, I spent many hours working out how to make those big ideas come to life in our homeschool. Focused reading is one technique I refined to teach my children the three Rs of great writers. My goal then is to share insights into the process of focused reading so that you might find it useful in your homeschool too. Despite its name, focused reading is not a “learn how to read” program. It’s a “learn how to write” tool. The idea behind focused reading is to use mini-lessons to teach kids to read like good writers do, to see techniques writers use and learn to use those techniques in their own writing. There are essentially three steps to focused reading: 1. Choose and gather 2. Read and see 3. Practice Choose and Gather This step is the foundation of focused reading. Choose a skill to teach and gather examples of that skill in use. Over the course of the year I generally teach aspects of word choice, sentence and organization style, and punctuation. However, the skills I choose are more specific. Under the category of word choice, I might focus on strong verbs for one lesson and interesting adjectives in another. I then gather two or three brief examples of that skill in use. Model pieces are three or fewer paragraphs for prose and forty lines or fewer for poetry. Although I include examples from professional authors, it is important to show them pieces from other children because it helps them see that the concept is not over their heads, that it is possible for a young person like themselves to also use the technique. Finding professional writing examples is easy; all I do is peruse my kid’s bookcase. At first it took some time to flip through the books to find examples, but it was well worth it. Now that I’ve been doing this for a while, I’m in the habit of noticing examples even when we are reading for pleasure or content. When I do, I label it with a sticky note for future use and have reduced my preparation time overall. A book by Marcia Freeman called Models for Teaching is a useful resource to get started as it provides short lists of example texts for target skills. However, I had to do quite some exploring to find good children’s writing. In the end, I return over and over to the same sources: children’s magazines like Stone Soup provide high quality examples of stories and poetry. Likewise, the Write Source website offers models of children’s writing (grades 1-12) in different genres, including nonfiction. Don’t forget that siblings and other homeschoolers are also a great source from which to learn. Read and See Once your models have been gathered, it’s time to read and analyze how the target skill is used. I begin this step by letting my children know where the passage came from, who the author is, and what the context is. I also provide definitions of unfamiliar vocabulary. They read the passage silently; then we read it aloud. I encourage them to pinpoint the skill themselves through discussion questions: What did you like about this piece? Why? What did the author do to help you feel (see, hear) that way? Why do you think the author chose to do it that way? Could he or she have done it differently? What didn’t you like? Why? The first goal of discussion is to help them see the specific tools writers use to get their message across. More often than not, children respond with general comments about what they read: “I liked it,” or “It has a lot of action.” Questioning, however, prompts them to identify specifics. If my children still struggle with finding key points, I give them more specific questions, such as “what words does the author use to show action?” The second goal of discussion is to help the children see that the author made specific choices when using the skill. This reinforces the idea that techniques can be used in different ways by different writers, including them. Practice The final step is for the children to use the skill in their own writing. I frequently kick off focused reading by having them write a short journal piece, providing topics that are conducive to later incorporation of the focus skill. Personal narratives, for instance, encourage the use of description (active verbs, colorful adjectives) and time order skills (transition words). After the mini-lesson, we return to the piece so they can work on incorporating the skill into it. Of course, it doesn’t have to be done in this order, and sometimes they write the piece after our discussion. Also, practice doesn’t end once the lesson is over. The kids continue to incorporate the focus skill in other journal entries over the course of one to two weeks. A focused reading lesson takes thirty minutes to one hour. If we don’t get everything done because we have a longer discussion or they want to write more, I just continue the lesson the next day. This process has proven successful for us, as I find my children transferring what they learned in the focused reading workshops to other writing projects as well. Not sure which skills to teach? Tune in next week for more information.
Talent Is Overrated: Teaching the Three Rs of Great Writers
When we think of writers who have left their names etched in history, such as Robert Frost or J.K. Rowling, two words that come to mind are talented, unique, and we lift them up on a pedestal of literary greatness. We set them apart as endowed with a gift for fashioning one-of-a-kind creations. But this idea is a myth, one that has ruined students of writing for years, including me. In reality good writers have no greater knack than the average person. What they do have is the wherewithal to work hard. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn this lesson until late in life, and since I was never labeled as talented, I always criticized my work as lacking that mysterious gift of distinction. This hindered my writing or made me avoid it altogether. But when I started homeschooling my children, I didn’t want the talent myth to hurt their relationship with writing as it did me. It is a relationship after all, whether you like it, love it, deal with it, fear it, or avoid it. Of course, I wanted my kids to have a positive interaction with writing, so I knew I needed the right approach. That tactic is to teach them what all good writers do: revise, read, and reap from others. It’s believed that Hemingway revised the final chapter of A Farewell to Arms 39 times. Now I’m not suggesting I had my eight year old revise her snowman story even close to that amount. I’m not Mommy Dearest. The fact remains, however, that proficient writers don’t quit after their first drafts. They revise, revise, and revise again, so I knew I had to teach my children this habit right at the beginning. For their very first writing projects of the year, I focused on revising. The first thing I had them do with their initial drafts, though, was tuck them away in their folders, not to look at them again (at least for a few days). In the meantime, we read a few stories and articles done by professional and child authors, especially children within a few years of their ages. Many homeschool writing curriculums include step-by-step samples of children’s writings along with the revised versions, so I used a few of these along with a sample from one of their favorite authors. We looked at the before and after versions, discussing what we liked and didn’t like about the samples, what we might have done differently and why. I topped this all off with a cute video of two elementary school kids teaching about revising. The video was a hit, and in the end, they were anxious to get back to work on their own pieces, frequently asking to do so. I firmly believe that stepping away from their drafts for a while was an important aspect. It not only gave them a break but it allowed them to return to their work with fresh eyes, so they could better see where improvements could be made. We now always take at least a few days, no more than a week, hiatus between first drafts and revising for each writing project. Showing my kids the powerful effects of revising has had a positive influence on them. I agree with Stephen King, who writes, “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” Good writers read for entertainment, yes, but they also read to reap skills from other writers. After all, authors use most of the same techniques; they just use them in different ways to make their ideas meaningful and to suit their purposes. I try to teach these same skills to my children through what I call focused reading. During this time, which is often our hiatus from a writing project, we read passages that model a particular skill that I’ve pre-chosen. For example, one time they wrote a description of something that was special to them (a toy, friend, family member). I also wrote my own description. Then we read a paragraph from The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, which provides wonderful physical depictions using similes. We talked briefly about what made them interesting, and using my example first, worked together replacing one of my descriptions with a simile. They then practiced the technique with their own descriptions. Again, we usually read from a variety of sources including works done by other children. It’s only a matter of finding a piece that is representative of the skill I want to teach—a topic more deeply discussed in a future post. I would be careless if I didn’t mention that I keep focused reading separate from reading for pleasure. If every time they read turns into a lesson, they will find it burdensome and may become reluctant to read. Needless to say, I provide plenty of opportunities for free reading as well. I have no doubt they are still learning then, too. In helping my kids practice the three Rs, they will not only become proficient writers, they will also learn that their favorite authors are not much different from them, that there’s no special gift of writing bestowed on a few, no mystery to it. There are only techniques and tools they can use to create whatever inspires them.
