Introduction
Creative writing has long been a pastime and mode of expression that brings meaning to my life. Not only is it a tool to reflect on my own experiences, but it’s a space in which I can take risks and play. These are the very experiences I want to impart to my students in this curriculum unit.
Through the medium of “love letters” in prose and poetry to foods, places, words, animals, and toys, this curriculum unit leverages creative writing to make meaning from and celebrate all the ordinary pieces of our lives. Over the course of several weeks, students will read mentor works, write their own creative pieces, and workshop writing with peers to practice revision. Finally, students will illustrate and compile these writing pieces into a class anthology. While the main objective of this unit is for students to work on the craft of creative writing, it is also a chance for students to share and teach about what matters to them.
Pedagogical Philosophy
My pedagogical beliefs hinge on explicit instruction, a method of teaching in which a skill is directly modeled for students before they try, at first with guidance and support and then without. Many students in our school come from homes where their parents did not graduate from college, or even high school. The academic skills that will be expected of these students as they progress through their K-12 experience are not learned naturally at home, the way they sometimes are for students whose home environments provide more advantages and resources. Thus, it is my job to teach these academic skills as explicitly as possible, demystifying them and giving students the tools to be successful in their school careers. The alternative to explicit instruction is letting students infer how to do something by watching, which leaves room for error and often frustrates students when it comes to complex tasks. Many academic thinking processes have to be taught and practiced because they are not intuitive. For example, when students learn how to use context clues to define an unknown word (a skill adults now do without even thinking about it), they learn multiple explicit strategies they can try when they come to an unknown word. Examples of these strategies include reading before and after the unknown word, referring to pictures or diagrams, and inferring by “plugging in” a potential synonym and rereading to see if it makes sense. In this way, students are given the “keys” to unlock their learning and not just left to guess at what a process entails.
Within the context of explicit instruction, and particularly in writing, students are provided with a script for an effective paragraph: a topic sentence written with specific sentence stems, three supporting details that explain or develop the topic, and a concluding sentence that restates the topic of the paragraph. Deviation from this script can lead to lower scores on standardized assessments. (Second graders do not take the district-wide assessments to which I refer, but our school asks that we start getting them ready for these tests early on.)
However, this method of teaching does not always leave room for discovery and exploration. In learning the “formula” for an informational paragraph, students don’t get to experiment with their own writing voice. While I believe strongly in explicit instruction, I also believe in encouraging passions and letting students learn by doing and trying. These may seem at odds at times, but they are not. I can give my students the keys to academic work while also giving them room to discover what they love and how they can express themselves as individuals, both within parameters and outside of them.
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