Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Free Writing for Language Arts and content areas
Last year I was coteaching in a 7th grade language arts class. We started doing a freewrite activity at the beginning of class during our poetry unit. It was great fun since the students were motivated to read out loud by allowing them to perform if they wanted to. Some students did raps, some did creative readings.
I started this fall with freewrites in my pull out Level 2 EL class grade 7. They are motivated by what they can create and show and perform for their fellow students. Sometimes it is competetive between them--I don't make it competetive, they do. Sometimes they bring the writing home to add to or improve it--and they are excited to show it the next day!
I think this generation is motivated more about what they can show the world than what the world can show them--social media makes so much sense--like facebook is about what you can PUT OUT THERE--not so much about how you can injest more from others.
I would suggest doing freewrites in ALL content areas and just see what the students do creatively with the vocabulary and concepts--just give it a try!
--Ann Browning Zerby
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This activity sounds great! I particularly like what you said, "this generation is motivated more about what they can show the world than what the world can show them". This is the generation that has grown up on facebook, that is used to judging others and being judged based upon the image they can project to the world. It sounds like freewriting is a great way to allow them to show the world (and their peers) exactly what they want to. I am interested to try this with my fifth graders!
ReplyDeleteI am not doing freewrites, but I completely agree with the point you made Ann. I just had an enrichment in class where students created stories and acted them out or made comic strips of the stories. I was surprised not only at the enthusiasm for the activity, but also for the quality of the creations. I think that I will try to balance creation with analysis as I go forward in the English units I'm teaching this year. Not only does it increase their enthusiasm and participation, but it also helps them understand the concepts from a different perspective.
ReplyDeleteI definitely think I need to incorporate freewriting or creative writing more. A few times this year, I've had students do more "creative" writing prompts and those are their favorites. Like you said, Ann, it seemed like EVERYONE wanted to share their stories! I feel like I'm under this impression that I don't have the time, but maybe I need to make time more regularly. 10 minutes at the beginning of class could work well, for example.
ReplyDeleteI teach a co-taught English 7 class. My co-teacher and I try to imcorporate some sort of freewriting or creative writing activity at the beginning of each class period (usually about 5 minutes). We call on different students every day to read what they wrote. It has worked really well for our students, because we can then give students feedback about their writing.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the additional ideas.
ReplyDeleteTo add, I did a freewrite with my L1/L2 pull-out EL class which focuses on Geography. We did a freewrite about 2 pictures--one showing a developed country, one showing an undeveloped country. I was amazed at how much this resonated with each student. They knew WAY more about dev/undev than I thought they did in terms of being able to articulate it in a meaningful way. And when I think about it, OF COURSE they would know this--they all lived in UDCs! And each student contributed some information about their experience with each picture. It was much more powerful to show the UDC picture--showed that first. The DC picture was more for reference and comparison. I'm excited for building on this tomorrow. I see future diplomats, honestly. It was a real ah-ha moment for me. It just goes to show you, you can't just assume students are low or unexposed about everything in their education, especially when they have been refugees. For some, they actually lived what the mainstream students are learning about in textbooks.
One version of the "free-write" that I have used periodically is a freewrite journal response. This is where I have them write a journal response (can be as long as you want) where they write from the perspective of someone in history, someone who lived in the time period we are studying etc... You could do a character from a novel, whatever. I like this because it gets them writing in a non-threatening way AND it requires them to think about an event from another person's perspective.
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