Marshmallows

One thing I love is writing. Since I can remember I have loved creating stories, describing new worlds in with my worlds, creating best friends and evil enemies from the characters I dreamt up. 

As a teacher I thought that this passion for writing would transfer over in to teaching it easily, so that I would immediately be an expert at getting each and every child to love writing as much as I do. 

This obviously did not happen (everything I do as a teacher serves to remind me that I need to stay humble). Instead I struggle to teach some of those basic skills that came more naturally to me as a child, I struggle to balance encouraging the creative passion for writing with the expectations as to teaching it in a thoughtfully constructed but sometimes artificial feeling way, I struggle to encourage those writers who haven't yet found their voice or their confidence to put pen to paper. 

Luckily despite all the struggling writing is still one of my favourite things to teach, and I will share a few of my strategies along the way. This session was a rather last minute one where I realised I would need to manage the whole class of 52 writers for a block, and needed to find something that would engage them all (and produce some published writing for them to display). 

Literacy shed to the rescue! I adore their videos and want to find more ways to incorporate them into my writing programme. Today I pulled out a favourite: Marshmallows! About a boy with a campfire, a monster who is rife with descriptive details, a whole load of suspense and surpise, and of course some marshmallows. We watched through some of this clip and then created a giant brainstorm of some of the descriptive language we could use. Similes and metaphors flew forward as fast as I could record them (although in retrospect I would get them to share some ideas first with buddies before I start collating them).

We then watched right up to a key suspenseful moment where the boy runs out of marshmallows, and then I handed it over to them to end the story. Away they rushed to scribble down an ending suitable for this video (hopefully using some of the rich vocabulary we discussed earlier).  It was one of the first times I experienced students wanting to stay inside and finish after the bell had already gone - and I was stoked!

We came back after the break and shared some of our endings. This part of writing I know is so important - having that chance to share with others - and definitely something I need to prioritise throughout the week. Some endings were funny, some were scary, some were short, some were long, some were ridiculous, some were sensible, some were dramatic. The most amazing thing for me was just the fact that it seemed like 99.9% of the class wanted to write.

Over the next week we published these endings, and of course there are still students slowly working away at this. But the more they see other endings up on the wall the more encouraged they seem to be to add theirs to the collection. My mentor teacher created the QR code to link to the video in our display (on my ever-growing list of things to learn) and I thought that was such a simple but fun way to incorporate technology in to our writing. This now can be a reading activity where students can watch the video and read the alternate endings. 

So what made this session more effective then others I had done? I think the most important thing for this activitiy was that writing the ending meant that there was less pressure to come up with a whole story. The characters and setting, beginning and middle were already there and students could focus on a small part of the writing process.

This doesn't mean I will get them to do an ending every time, but it reminded me how important it is to have a variety of tasks for encouraging writing and inspiring children to see themselves as the authors are. It was by no means a perfect writing session, but it goes on my rather small list of teaching wins so far.