BWC: Writing Tips

Last week we had the opportunity to meet with a few ladies that have a great deal of experience in helping kids to apply themselves in the area of writing. They had heard about our BWC program and were eager to help us with our research and instruction of the Boys at Ridgeway. A few of the tips that shared with us made a lot of sense and I am looking forward to applying them to my instruction and assistance at the BWC.

#1. Jotting down critical kernels: If you are having trouble helping a student get started with their writing, one step that they shared is to have the student answer a few questions about their thoughts toward the subject matter. As they share their thoughts, you as the instructor should jot down ideas or thoughts that they share. EWHen they are done talking, you share with them the kernels that you heard them share. THen you can challenge them to write about two of them. This will help them focus their thoughts and help them indicate a great jumping off point to get started with their writing.

#2. Oral Rehearsal: By challenging the student to rehearse orally what they plan to write can help them organize their thoughts before jumping in. As they talk about their thoughts, it is important not to correct their verbiage. The ladies that shared with us indicated that incorrect verbiage is very frequent and common with students of this age and this will be corrected as they grow and mature. To grill them on incorrect verbiage at this age can derail the thought process and defeat the purpose of getting them to think imaginatively and attempt to write. Allow them some freedom and encourage lots of descriptive words and imaginative thinking!

#3. Body Language: Apparently our body language goes a long way in wether the students feel defeated or not in their writing skills. If we sit up close to them and hover over them, it is not uncommon for a student to feel smothered and corrected. This usually produces feelings of inadequacy as the teacher looks to correct them and spoon feed them answers. If we are to take a more open approach and sit back giving them a bit more space, they are more likely to feel a bit of freedom and trust form us. Giving them the space they need to spread their wings as writers and thinkers is what they need as long as they know we are there and care about the work that they are doing.

VTS #2

I had the opportunity this past week to lead another VTS session with our Boys Writers Club group. Following up our trip to the corn maze with the boys last week, we decided to have them write some thank you notes to the people that helped run the event. Before challenging them with this task, we looked at an image with them for inspiration. THe image we looked at was a painting by Norman Rockwell that was on the cover of Saturday Evening Post in 1920. The image shows a young boy busy writhing a letter with a great deal of focus and determination. We hoped that by showing this image to our group of boys that they would have an image in their minds of a boy writing that they could identify as someone similar to themselves. We hoped that they would relate to the image and realize that boys do write! I feel that the exercise was successful due to their responses in our VTS session.

As I began to ask the boys what they saw in the image, a number of them kept answering that they thought the boy was writing to the Samurai warriors (the subject of our recent sessions with them). As I asked them why they thought he was writing to the Samurai they seemed stumped and didn't know how to answer my question which to them had an obvious answer. He is like us and that is what we write about! They mentioned that the boy looked young and had a dog to play with and that is how they determined that he was close to their age. They certainly identified the boy as someone the could relate with and so we felt that this was a successful exercise in helping them gain confidence and purpose in their writing.

One of the boys also mentioned that the clothes that the boy was writing looked old and dirty. He talked about why he thought they looked old and how this meant that the picture is from a while ago. He was able to use several strong descriptive words in his reasoning for determining that the clothing was from a different generation which was very editing. For the most part it is a challenge to get the see boys to use strong descriptive words. They tend to want to pint things out in the picture instead of using their words to relay what they are trying to say. We have begun using a word wall to write any descriptive words down as the boys use them in our discussions. Our hope is to get the boys to realize that we are hoping to help them use more interesting language when they are writing. We tend to see that their is a bit of competition going on when we use the word wall as all of them hope to have a word added to the wall where everyone can see. We think that this competition is a good thing. In the instance where the boy was expelling why he thought the picture was an old picture due to the style and condition of clothing, it seemed that some progress had been made in helping him use more descriptive words.