Tag Archives: Elementary School

Inspired Summer Writing Ideas from Writers in the Schools

School’s out for summer, but for those students who love to put pen to paper, or who are, perhaps, just discovering the thrill of finding their own voices, the summer doesn’t have to mean a break from writing. The long, lazy days ahead offer countless opportunities to dive into writing in a way that is not always possible during the school year. In the summer issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine, just out, we’ve asked teaching artists from Teachers & Writers Collaborative and from other writers-in-the-schools programs around the country for their best summer writing prompts, and have put their creative, fun, interesting, and off-beat ideas together here to help inspire budding writers from kindergarten through high school. Happy writing!

 

 

Elementary School

Harriet Riley
Write a letter. Write to your grandmother in Guatemala or to your favorite football player or your favorite singer. Tell them about what you are doing this summer and what your interests are. If you are writing to someone you don’t know,  tell them why you admire them. Then be sure to get an envelope and stamp from your parents,  and address and mail the letter. The best part is you might just get a letter back from someone.

Explore alliteration by making a list of words that all start with the same letter. Just choose a letter and create a word avalanche—use nouns,  adjectives,  verbs,  adverbs,  anything. Just list all you can think of. Then order the words into a poem. Think shape and line breaks,  think meaning or be as silly as you can. Have fun with it!

Maya Pindyck
If you find yourself at a beach,  a lake,  a river,  or a stream,  look for five stones on the shore that you consider to be special or beautiful in some way. Sit down with those stones—either right where you are or back home—and study each one very closely. Come up with a different metaphor for each stone. Then write an “Ode to the Stone” that explores one or more of the metaphors you came up with.

Anthony Calypso
Ask an adult in your family for a photo that was taken before you were born. Do not ask any details about the picture. Instead,  take the picture and create a very short story based on the details you see in it. When you are finished,  return the photo to the adult and show what you wrote about it. (more...)

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month

April brings us National Poetry Month, and to mark the occasion the spring Issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine features three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry to the elementary, middle, and high school classroom.  Written by experienced teaching artists, these exercises offer suggestions for using contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from students.  This week we feature Jane LeCroy's exercise, based on a poem by May Swenson.

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month

One:

Exercising the Imagination:
Teaching May Swenson’s “Cardinal Ideograms” to Elementary School Students

Jane LeCroy

‘‘Cardinal Ideograms” by May Swenson is a poem that works like a puzzle; experimental in form and appearance, it engages the imagination by inspiring playful connections with the familiar. Poetry is so much about the play of language leading one to see things in a new way. A successful poem, like Swenson’s, creates space for new thoughts to emerge, expanding our world and our thinking. Students in a classroom setting generally focus on being correct; this impulse is often detrimental to experimentation and creativity. Here is an excellent exercise in playing with language that can encourage students to imagine and take risks as writers, and to see things in a new way.

I introduce “Cardinal Ideograms” by inviting the students to think of it like a game. “Who can figure out the game of this poem? I know you won’t know the meaning of every word but you can figure out what the poet is playing with. Listen and look closely, follow along as I read, and see if you can figure it out.” I read aloud, without clarifying any of the vocabulary so that the students have a raw experience with the text, giving them a chance to discover what is happening within it themselves. It’s a great way to get them to take responsibility for interacting with the poem, and it builds confidence in kids when they discern meaning from a text without having a complete grasp of every word in it. (more...)