Construct…Discover, Try Again
From the Desk of Tina…
The little girl reread her sentence and erased the words again. “That … doesn’t … sound right,” she mumbled. She flipped her long brown hair over her shoulder in frustration. Her eyes moved from her paper to the board, back to the paper. She placed the paper on her desk and sauntered to the board. She looked intently at the picture about which she was writing. When she first began writing … 20 minutes? 40 minutes? ago, … her characters were exactly as they appeared in the picture. There was a girl with blond hair and a boy with brown hair. They were both playing in the neighborhood. But as she continued to write, her ideas changed. Her words came together on paper, but somehow differently than ever before. Her characters had developed unique thoughts and actions. They did not experience just one moment in time, but several dynamic events. They had even encountered a problem! Now, the little girl struggled to form an idea about how the characters would solve their problem. … Aha! She dashed back to her desk began writing furiously. Yes, this story was taking her to another place.
This little girl was me. One day in 3rd grade changed my life. My teacher did a very simple thing: she put pictures on the tray of the chalk board and said, “write.” On this day, there was no lecture, no writing prompt, no mandated graphic organizer to complete before writing. We could simply write. I do not know how she made this decision. Maybe she was tired of teaching that day. Maybe she forgot to run copies of her graphic organizers. Perhaps she lost her book of writing prompts and had to paw through her file cabinet for Plan B five minutes before the writing block began.
However it happened, she gave us all a gift that day. She gave us freedom to construct, discover, and try again. Of course, she desired the same end result as most teachers – she wanted her students to create a neat piece of writing that we could post outside the classroom. But she did not force us to follow her path to get there. She wanted us to explore our ideas and create our own path.
When teaching our children about writing, it is important to emphasize that writing is not a linear process. Teachers have the best of intentions to teach children tools to share their thoughts. But sometimes, a quick write can lead to a more developed story than the most detailed graphic organizer!
Children have the gift of imagination. We have the privilege of guiding their steps for a very short, but very significant, period of time. There may not be many moments in their lives that they have such a captivating story to tell. We have to help them tell it! Let them construct their own story. Let them discover what will happen next. If it does not turn out the way you (or they) hoped, the good news is … we can try again.