Amid the flurry of curricular requirements coming down from districts and states, elementary school educators are still working to build in time for students to express themselves creatively through in-class journaling time.
“We’ve gotten away from the generation of ideas, with all of our boxed and scripted curriculums,” said Victoria Dotson, 5th grade teacher at John W. Garvy Elementary School in Chicago and a member of the National Council of Teachers of English Elementary Teacher Cohort.
“It really is important for students to still have that time and autonomy to write about themselves, about their life, about their culture and identity,” Dotson said. “I want to make sure I give them the opportunity to be authors of their own work.”
To get students’ creative juices flowing, Dotson uses “mentor texts” to allow students the opportunity to learn from a published author, and to model and then borrow ideas, themes and topics for their own writing.
“Some students struggle with the idea of writing freely,” she said. “I focus on teaching them to generate ideas for their own writing. Strategies include creating lists, using oral storytelling, and looking at pictures from home.”
Dotson finds that students who are reading a lot have more ideas for their own writing.
“They are using the mentor-text mentality when reading a graphic novel or historical fiction, and sometimes those things show up in their own writing,” she said. “That is the strategy, is making sure they’re reading, they’re writing, and they notice the ties and connections, and can emulate those authors in their own work.”
Another approach for those who continue to have writer’s block is to encourage them to retell stories they have heard over and over from their families, Dotson said. “This way, students have a choice of what to tell about, but they don’t feel overwhelmed by that blank page.”
One student in her class wrote a multipart verse poem about her family’s journey seeking refuge in the U.S., Dotson recalled.
“Walking through the jungle, getting on a boat, getting on a plane,” she said. “It was a multilingual student who wrote in Spanish and English, and shared both versions with the class. Her classmates were engaged and proud to hear her share that story.”
And over time, Dotson said, she began noticing other students sharing their own stories about migration and moving and changes in their own families.
Whatever the topics involved, sharing aloud — as students are comfortable doing so — augments the experience, Dotson said.
“It gives that student the chance to become the teacher,” Dotson said. “As teachers, we’re not the only ones in the room with knowledge to share. By giving students the time to share their writing, we can notice and name what the child did successfully, and give the child the chance to explain that to peers."
