It's not a screen, a twitter, a video game, or a sound byte TV news clip....It's a BOOK!
See the preview here.

Teachers and parents are assaulted with the competition of novelty: gadgets that pull our kid's attention into a time warp, or anything battery-operated that promises salvation from boredom. What a challenge we have to direct their attention back to the seemingly mundane world of books, where we have to get our entertainment more from the inside out. The time warp of visiting "planet book" is one that paves the way for richer writing.

Teachers have to set strict rules with students about not using characters from video games or plots from TV or movies.

Okay, truth heals, so I will admit that when I am not obsessing about having tiny love handles that menopause is bringing on, I am perseverating about what to do with my clients. My kids. I often refer to "my kids" in passing, when referencing my students, and people think I am a mom. The truth is that I was so set on helping kids that I intentionally skirted past my opportunities to become a mom. I figured I was not patient enough for the task, and that it would prevent me from having the many careers and residencies that I have had.

Voila! I have more of my self to give. And I can dish out detailed parenting advice to my clients, consisting of success stories of other people's kids, not my own. No risk of hypocrisy. And....No regrets about being choicefully childless.

Last week I saw Nora Ephron, best known as the author who wrote the script for 'When Harry Met Sally', since she is on tour for her new book, I Remember Nothing...She is an author I get green with envy over. She uses turns of phrase, plus wittiness laced with such candor you either drop your jaw at what she gets away with, or you laugh out loud. She also sprays some illuminating guideposts about the writing process onto her audience of readers.

So like her, I am searching for the invisible upside to aging that I am not seeing or feeling. Looking in the mirror or at all my post-it notes doesn't help my search. She simply says the only upside is that she is still here.

So I am presently baffled (but have faith that I will come up with something) by what to do with students who insist on detail-arama when summarizing a book. They go on about a character's braid's, or their invisible cloak, their doctor’s mannerisms, science fair project, or even a magical creature's eating habits, but they don't write about the fact that the problem of the book is, for example, that a) Jenny’s friends are envious of her braids, b) the magic cloak helps Jeremy follow the suspect, c) Miranda keeps getting sick, d) after 3 attempts, Billy wins the science fair, or e) a tribe of magical creatures is taking over a kingdom. And these are the students who write simplistic, minimalistic sentences that lack detail, when they are writing descriptive paragraphs of their own lives! It is like detail got vacuumed right out of their page, whereas in the summaries, that is all there is.

I have to remind myself that writing summaries is one of the hardest skills of all the comprehension menu of strategies and skills.

And Story Maps for everything. And practice telling true life events out loud, WITH detail, and then just as a summary. I ask for them to tell me in 3 sentences what they did on Saturday, for example, if I want a summary. Or I ask for 5 Key Words, and then those are what they have to use in their recap.

Too many error messages tonight while trying to get all the links and photos inserted, so I am posting it like this....

Jumping Through Hoops

Some of my kids think of writing as just jumping through hoops, with no passion for how writing can elicit thoughts and feelings you did not know you had, until the pen moved, and no thrill for the magic of words, or even the opportunity to express their opinion. (Jumping through hoops is how I approach drudgery tasks like online applications, or taking the garbage and recycling bins up to the top of our steep and long driveway.  Not much passion). 

So I have to be careful when I say things like "use 3 supporting details" because I risk they will see that as just another hoop, instead of a guideline to prevent rambly writing, or dimly supported topic sentences.

I read over 100 postings on several teacher forums this week, about teaching writing.  The gist of the discussions was:

• Kids need a lot of variety of forms to practice writing
• It takes an inordinate amount of time and organization to teach writing
• The good teachers read papers and journals all night and all weekend

 I searched for what to do with the kids who aren't keeping up, yet the answer to the nit picky, struggling writer questions was basically just to have them write more, and more often.  Well, haven't we been there; done that. Funny how our kids don't say, "Oh thanks ________ (insert significant adult's name here)!  I am going to sit over there right now and write up a storm!"  Telling these guys to just write more can be like telling a dieter to just go to the gym more. It's another hoop to resist jumping through! 

Microscopic assignments,  a sentence a day, a comic a day, a line of a song.  Tiny pieces of writing to keep that part of the brain alive.  Word Games. Written notes to said parents or guardians convincing them to let them go ________ or do __________.  I know a parent who is currently holding her ground on letting her 12-year old son get a cell phone, UNLESS he writes a persuasive letter that convinces her otherwise.  I saw his first attempt and it was meek and unconvincing.  "Take 2".  He is attempting a second draft.

A healthy hoop to jump through.

Healthy Thanksgiving Wishes,

Kendra

Summarizing

So..... I come upon another study about the value of one-on-one instruction, in a blog by a local neuropsychologist couple

Eide Neurolearning Blog

The Eides create this blog for parents and practitioners, and I admire them for their Harvard-based intellect and therapeutic compassion.  They assess and work with kids like those that I work with, and we all advocate for kids - pressing schools to customize themselves enough for the nuances that come with the territory.
I have met them at conferences and for coffee, and they are humble yet geeky, quirky, yet cheeky.  Kinda like me.

So this week I hit a wall with my gifted 4th grader who is absolutely struggling to write book summaries.

Okay, I am supposed to insert a cute graphic or another link, if i am to follow blog protocol, but I am going to rebel against the blog experts.

Dates

I have to figure out how to get my posts in the right order....they have found their own non-sequential way of stacking themselves, much like my budding writers have their sentences all over the place.

One-on-One Time

SIGH...

If I could bottle patience and sell myself a 12-pack I would do it right away. Peddle it to Costco. I feel so frustrated with the slow progress of:

a) Schools, in the systemic changes necessary to meet the individual needs of kids

b) My movement on writing my book and marketing my private practice in an ongoing way

c) Some of my students who seem “flat line” in their reading or writing progress

Other tutors talk about this last one, too. The intensity of intervention that is needed is something the average family does not have the time or money for. So I plug along with my once-a-week sessions packing what I can into that hour and praying that the daily practice happens. Parents are so taxed, often with both of them working, and managing stress in the most creative ways they can, plus doing what they can for their child, that my good ideas often float into the section of the brain called “information overload.”

All the research points to intervention, and specially-designed instruction, and monitoring response to the interventions, with high levels of precision, a wealth of materials, and astute teacher knowledge. Schools don't quite have the resources to meet up with the criteria that the research has revealed the importance of.

Teachers know what they need more of to be good writing instructors: TIME. Just to sit down one-on-one with their students and have the luxury to discuss their writing. The adults I talk to who are good writers, or at least don't resist it (!), can name at least one, if not a few, teachers who took that time, and inspired them to express their insides onto the outside, with words.

At the ADD Conference I attended this weekend I discovered that there is actually a chemical response to one-on-one attention. Dopamine. It is one of the biggest gifts we can give kids, and in schools that can be rare. So it falls upon me to be that attentional facet that showers them with praise and feedback about their writing, and discipline myself to keep the corrections at a minimum.

I encourage so much “self talk” in my students, but in my present impatient state I need my own, when I get blank stares or “I’m done” attitudes about writing that is seriously skeletal. I tell myself that LD writers have years of frustration behind them, look upon writing as something that taxes their brain, and become more overwhelmed by grammar and spelling than I can begin to imagine. So that self-talk helps me focus on them and come up with something wise to guide them into a next step. And they have less life experience, which leaves some assignments impossible to swallow.

A 6th grader was asked to write about what a day in the life of a caveman might be like. This was after a brief reading from a textbook on the introduction of Prehistoric Times. He was just stuck, and had no rubric, or list of words to include, and no one had asked him what the picture in his head was! We started with that, and it took a lot of word-retrieval tooth pulling to get that out of him, then we brainstormed words, then started an organizer, and our time was up.

Time away from the screen, away from consumerism, away from pressure to produce. And a one-on-one hour with an adult. That will create the next generation of writers.