The Ideas Trait

In 6+1 Traits of Writing, Culham spends a good deal of time writing about different ways to prompt students' ideas for a writing project. One thing that frustrated me was that a lot of the advice seemed geared towards elementary school teachers. While it might be helpful for a 15-year old to look through "family photographs for ideas" (p.54), it seems that there must be more effective--and interesting--ways to get the gears turning inside of a teenager's mind.

The resource link I chose for this posting is the CBS News page for strange new stories. I think that a fun way to prompt a writing activity or to brainstorm writing ideas would be to go through some of these stories with a class. Students might be able to write a story that explained the strange news, give a history of the people it is about, or maybe it would lead ideas/brainstorms in a whole new direction. The "Strange" news stories are listed in most newspapers, so that would be an option as well.

Truly, my biggest grievance with the Culham reading for this week is that ALL of the examples, and most of the suggestions, are clearly aimed at the 3rd-6th grade age range. While there is a small chance that I will someday teach 6th grade, I will likely be in a classroom with older students. I flipped through the rest of the book, and there are writing examples from older students. Nonetheless, I felt that Culham's advice in the beginning of the book was not very helpful for me. However, it did get me thinking about how to grade more efficiently and with a defined purpose. Over the years I have "looked over" quite a few papers for friends, colleagues, etc. I usually spend a lot of time on them, write a lot, and work on both editing and revising. Culham encourages us to focus on one particular trait of writing as well as define our purpose for reading it before we read students' work. Although part of me still wants to give students written advice on all aspects of writing, I realize that this is practically impossible to do with written comments, and face-to-face conferences are difficult to manage on a frequent basis. I believe that Culham's advice is wonderful for finding a way to make the assessment part of teaching writing more practical and manageable.