Tag Archives: middle 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...)

The Power of Images in the Hands of 8th-Graders

Eighteen students sit around a polished wooden table. I take in the varsity jackets hanging on the backs of chairs, the excellent orthodonture, and the cleverly modified uniforms (collars on the collared shirts so slim that they look like ribbons). Outside the window lies manicured shrubbery and well-tended stone walls. Beyond these, are the impressive estates with service entrances that I drove past on the way in.

I ask students to share from their image journals. Hands shoot up.

Prior to my arrival for my two-day writer’s residency at this tony Connecticut prep school, I had given the image journal assignment to the classroom teacher to share with the students.

My mandate is to help 8^th-graders deepen their short stories. I wanted to hit the ground running—with material from our lives that we could use to deepen our fiction. (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 Sarah Dohrmann's exercise, inspired by Ross Gay's poem, "The Truth."

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month
Three:

Because Poems:Teaching Ross Gay's "The Truth"
to Middle and High School Students

Sarah Dohrmann

At the age of 14 my first “real” job was at Wendy’s. I worked the potato ovens for several weeks until I burned my hand badly. I was then switched over to cashier, but when my drawer was forty bucks short one day, I was demoted to sweeping up the dining area. This presented another problem in the form of a school nemesis who’d come into the restaurant, order French fries, sit in the dining room, and toss her fries one-by-one onto the floor so she could watch me sweep each one with a broom into a long-handled dustpan that I could never seem to hold right.

At the same time I worked at Wendy’s, my family was about nine years into a disperate attempt to patch itself together after my mother’s death. The patching process is still underway these thirty-odd years later, because recovery is slow when no one talks about loss. We prefer to mime our way through innuendo and pain, making our non-actions as weighted and important as anything we might actually say or do.

Perhaps it’s my personal background, then, that first drew me to Ross Gay’s poem “The Truth”, which appears in his first collection, called Against Which:

The Truth

          Ross Gay

Because he was 38, because this
was his second job, because
he had two daughters, because his hands
looked like my father’s, because at 7
he would walk to the furniture warehouse,
unload trucks ‘til 3 AM, because I
was fourteen and training him, because he made
$3.75 an hour, because he had a wife
to look in the face, because
he acted like he respected me,
because he was sick and would not call out
I didn’t blink when the water
dropped from his nose
into the onion’s perfectly circular
mouth on the Whopper Jr.
I coached him through preparing.
I did not blink.
Tell me this didn’t happen.
I dare you.

(From Against Which by Ross Gay (CavanKerry Press, Ltd. 2006). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Like all poems we choose to teach, Gay’s poem moved me. It moved me not because of what the narrator chooses to do, but because of what he chooses not to do. I liked that it is a humble reflection, and that the narrator made a choice that others may not approve of. And I liked the repetition of the word “because,” how it lilted me along until I came to a full-stop of truth. Naturally I also liked that the narrator is fourteen years old, working at a fast food restaurant just like I once did—only this narrator is the better version of me, the less narcissistic one capable of thinking beyond his own discomforts while he works at a job he probably doesn’t love. (more...)