Teaching Creative Writing
in the Elementary School. ERIC Digest.
Most children enter school with a natural interest
in writing, an inherent need to express themselves
in words (Graves, 1983). Couple this with the child's
love of stories and nursery rhymes (Who has not seen
a goggle-eyed group of kindergartners lost in the
world of imagination as their teacher reads them a
favorite story or nursery rhyme?) and you have the
basis for building an emotionally involving and intellectually
stimulating creative writing program for your students.
This "Digest' should help teachers with that
task.
THE NECESSITY OF CREATIVE WRITING
Tompkins (1982) suggests 7 reasons
why children should write stories (these reasons,
of course, also apply to writing poetry): 1) to entertain;
2) to foster artistic expression; 3) to explore the
functions and values of writing; 4) to stimulate imagination;
5) to clarify thinking; 6) to search for identity;
and 7) to learn to read and write.
With these compelling reasons in mind, it is hard
to justify not making creative writing an important
part of the elementary school classroom day. It is
important that the reasons for writing be made clear
to administrators and parents, who may automatically
categorize creative writing as merely frivolous play,
something akin to recess. While writing certainly
should be enjoyable, and children should have opportunities
to choose their own subjects and methods of writing,
the importance of creative writing in developing children's
cognitive and communication skills cannot be underestimated
(Tompkins, 1982).
By being actively involved with, and
actively interrogating their involvement with the
elements that make up our written and oral communication,
these young writers of fiction will gain an intuitive
and intellectual understanding of its operations.
This kind of understanding will elude those who merely
observe it in its final, polished, professionally
produced presentation. Simply put, one can best understand
how something is constructed by attempting to put
it together yourself.
Both the writer of fiction and the writer
of nonfiction must put forth a similar kind of questioning
of his/her world. Teachers should emphasize that good
fiction requires logical consistency and factual accuracy.
Creative writers are asking us to believe in their
dreams, and this requires that they "get the
details right." If a student wants to write a
story about a pitcher for the Seattle Mariners, then
he/she should know things like: what the stadium looks
like, what kind of glove the pitcher wears, how high
the mound is, etc. Even stories that are based on
fantasy or science fiction, with monsters and space
aliens, need to obey various rules of logic; they
need to "make sense." For instance, what
might the monster eat? What kind of planet would the
alien come from? This kind of questioning can open
up many new areas of intellectual and emotional interest
for student writers of fantasy or science fiction.
These are areas that they might not have as easily
accessed through other types of writing. Thus, their
understanding of their world is deepened.
SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHING STORY-WRITING
One of the most difficult questions
for many creative writing instructors to answer is,
"What is a story?" Most children, by the
time they reach elementary school, have been exposed,
through first being read to, and then by reading on
their own, to hundreds of stories, and they may at
this point have an intuitive feel for what "seems
like a story" and what doesn't. But this "story-sense"
will vary in degree for each student, and it is not
something that can be relied upon to occur automatically.
A sense of what a story is can be reinforced during
classroom reading of stories, and also, importantly,
in post-story discussion. If students are led in a
helpful way in these discussions, they may begin to
see similarities and differences between books of
different writing styles and content and will begin
to form an idea of the forms and structures that stories
generally follow.
Taberski (1987) relates her experiences as a second-grade
teacher struggling with the difference between her
expectations of her students' writing and the reality
of it. She set out, as she says, to "research
the qualities of good fiction and then develop strategies
that young children could use to integrate these qualities
into their own writing." Her strategies are similar
to those used in graduate-school-level writing workshops,
but are tailored to the unique requirements of the
elementary-school classroom.
Graves & Hauge (1993) have students
take their growing knowledge of story structure and
utilize it in their own creative writing, using an
easy-to-understand checklist method. Hopefully, once
students are used to the self-monitoring checklist,
they will internalize some of the general concepts
of story structure and rely less on the checklist.
Rensenbrink (1987) offers a slightly
different approach which emphasizes children's personal
involvement and investment in their writing, and she
suggests several activities that will help children
keep their natural enthusiasm for writing.
For many children, one of the most enjoyable
aspects of writing fiction is that it allows them
to create "invisible friends" for themselves
in the characters that they invite into their stories.
However, to the "outsider" in this relationship--the
reader--these characters may come across as flat and
one-dimensional, in a word, unrealistic.
Leavell & Ioannides (1993) provide
specific suggestions about how to help students create
interesting, complex characters. Also, importantly,
they describe a method of having children evaluate
their own work in regards to the complexity of the
characterization.
FEEDBACK
Many teachers, particularly those who
did not get to take extensive college coursework in
English or creative writing, feel unsure of themselves
when confronted with giving feedback on students'
creative writing. They do not wish to stifle students'
creativity or expression of themselves, and may even
feel that appreciation of writing is so subjective
that comments that are at all critical may be unfair.
The writing workshop, long a standby of college creative
writing programs, can also be adapted to teaching
elementary students. Having students read each other's
work and comment upon it can help both reader and
writer. Writers are provided an audience for their
work, and, for many children, comments by their peers
will be attended to in ways that teacher comments
would not. The reader may pick up on techniques of
fiction that might not be apparent from reading a
professionally published book, and will have an emotional
investment in reading and understanding the work that
other kinds of reading do not offer. The writing workshop
can further the kind of critical thinking skills that
students are already being encouraged to use in other
aspects of their learning.
Many teachers report on being surprised
at the insightfulness and quality of the peer feedback
that is a product of the writing workshop. Of course,
as with much student interaction, this feedback needs
to be modeled and monitored. Lensmire (1994) comments
on his initial experiences teaching 8- and 9-year-olds
in the workshop format: "As I shifted control
over aspects of the work of literacy to children in
this third-grade classroom, children's relations with
each other became extremely important for their experiences
and writing in the workshop. These relations included
the rejection, by children, of members of the other
sex as partners in collaborative work, and peer hierarchies
granting those girls and boys at the top status and
influence, and those at the bottom the brunt of teasing
and exclusion." None of this should come as any
surprise to one who has regularly worked with children,
and this should not be seen as a disincentive to the
open sharing of writing in the classroom, but it is
important to consider the classroom management implications
of creative writing work.
ASSESSMENT
As mentioned above, many teachers view
creative writing as "impossible to grade,"
and think that any form of evaluation is necessarily
subjective and therefore often unfair. Related to
this belief, they think that if students' work cannot
be judged fairly, then there is no way of accurately
monitoring their growth and progress. Glazer (1994),
acknowledges these worries, but argues that assessment
can be practical, useful, and fair, providing that
the teacher clearly communicates consistent criteria
for the work that will be evaluated, criteria focusing
on writing skills such as description, organization,
and punctuation, rather than relying on the teacher's
general "impression" of the quality of the
work, or comparison with other students' work. These
criteria can be tailored to specific student strengths
and weaknesses, and can be modified as the child's
abilities develop. Glazer provides an example of a
"framework," a collection of several of
these criteria that she uses to assess students' writing.
PUBLICATION
Many teachers look at publication, in some form, as
being a useful and satisfying conclusion to a unit
of writing fiction. Having a finished version of the
student's work can often be a source of pride to the
student, and a way to share the specialness of creative
writing with his or her family. Publication also provides
motivation for a student to do the extra work of revision
and proofreading, which they might otherwise be lacking.
Greenberg and Shapiro (1987) discuss specific techniques
that will help teachers present their students' work
in the best, most attractive fashion. Simic (1993)
presents other alternatives to publishing as a way
of presenting student work to an audience, such as
writing competitions and "the author's chair."
REFERENCES
Glazer, Susan Mandel (1994). "Collaborating with
Children to Assess Writing Objectively." Teaching
K-8, 24(5), 108-09. [EJ 476 516]
Graves, Anne, and Rochelle Hauge (1993). "Using
Cues and Prompts to Improve Story Writing." Teaching
Exceptional Children, 25(4), 38-40. [EJ 464 063]
Graves, Donald H. (1983). Writing: Teachers
and Children at Work. Exeter, NH: Heinemann. [ED 234
430]
Greenberg, Harry, and Nancy Larson Shapiro
(1987). "Variations on the Culminating Event."
Teachers & Writers Magazine, 19(2), 10-11. [EJ
364 712]
Leavell, Alexandra, and Anne Ioannides
(1993). "Using Character Development to Improve
Story Writing." Teaching Exceptional Children,
25(4), 41-45. [EJ 464 064]
Lensmire, Timothy J. (1994). When Children
Write: Critical Re-Visions of the Writing Workshop.
New York: Teachers College Press.
Rensenbrink, Carla (1987). "Writing
as Play." Language Arts, 64(6), 59-60. [EJ 360
628]
Simic, Marjorie (1993). "Publishing
Children's Writing." ERIC Digest. Bloomington,
IN: ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading, English, and Communication.
[ED 363 884]
Taberski, Sharon (1987). "From
Fake to Fiction: Young Children Learn about Writing
Fiction." Language Arts, 64(6), 586-96. [EJ 360
627]
Tompkins, Gail E. (1982). "Seven
Reasons Why Children Should Write Stories." Language
Arts, 59(7), 718-21. [EJ 269 736]