I always knew I wanted to teach
But I was worried about teaching 3rd grade. At the start of my work with Dr. Kelly Krumrie and Ricks Center, I was nervous about starting out with primary education. I always wanted to teach middle and high school students, with the perspective that they had a solid foundation with the English language I could work with. I worried I wouldn't be effective for a younger demographic.
I was right that younger students learn differently. I was wrong to worry about these differences. Language for my students was a playful experience. Third graders have the benefit of not having hard and strict experience with writing. They are novices, and as such, writing is a form of exploration for them. They are not hindered by as many self-imposed expectations. They are not nervous to play with humor or abstract ideas. Most were not scared of what their peers would think of their poetry. Most were confident not only to write, but to draw, and to even sing for their poetry. |
I found in working with my students, that indeed they often couldn't separate art and images from their poetry. Auditory, visual, and tactile sensations are often interwoven into their poetry. Collage poetry, collaborative poetry, and lyric poetry were favorites of theirs.
On many instances, they wrote poems together without my prompting. Then they read them together as well. At the end of most of my lessons, kids were smiling, giggling, and playing. Many of them decided to continue writing poems based on the lesson, well after I was gone. Many wrote poems for me outside of class, so I could review them. I was working on a lesson with Sara's 3rd grade class, when a student asked for help writing his poem. It was lyric poetry, and he had been really struggling with coming up with verses for his poem. He had settled on writing a poem about how much he wanted to get out of class, and I challenged him to write about what he looked forward to as well. He told me he couldn't wait for summer vacation. He wrote on his paper, "summer is the thing of dreams." I was pleased to see a variation of the line made it to his final version. |
I'm immensely grateful for Dr. Krumrie and Writers in the Schools. When I got the email from CCESL that we had received a grant, I was overjoyed. It's a rare and incredible opportunity to spark young minds into writing. And I was constantly overwhelmed with wonder and excitement at the 3rd grade classes' abilities to write with such uninhibited potential. Without Writers in the Schools, I certainly know my teaching would be lackluster. There is potential in every student to become a poet, no matter how small. And Writers in the Schools brought my students a lot of joy through writing. Their silly poems and their serious poems, their odes to horses and their ditties about hyperbole--each poem brought a smile to my face, and to my students' faces.
Writing is an act of liberation. Joy through writing is incredibly freeing. Often we forget that the smallest and youngest of us feel overwhelmed by school, by extracurricular activities, by classmates and friends. They have little say over their day-to-day lives. And they take immense pride in their work, immense joy in sharing their writing to others. Writers in the Schools is providing these students with the ability to express their writing to a larger world, and that alone is an exciting experience for students as young as eight years old. By publishing an anthology of their work, in conjunction with CCESL and the University of Denver, we are giving these students a rare opportunity to shine.
Writing is an act of liberation. Joy through writing is incredibly freeing. Often we forget that the smallest and youngest of us feel overwhelmed by school, by extracurricular activities, by classmates and friends. They have little say over their day-to-day lives. And they take immense pride in their work, immense joy in sharing their writing to others. Writers in the Schools is providing these students with the ability to express their writing to a larger world, and that alone is an exciting experience for students as young as eight years old. By publishing an anthology of their work, in conjunction with CCESL and the University of Denver, we are giving these students a rare opportunity to shine.