Hi, I m Carmen Agra Deedy and I m here to help you with your young writers. Even the
children that really do not like to write, when we get into story workshop and we orally
work a story as a group, and we ll say okay, but wait a minute, wait a minute. We re going
to do a story about a giraffe that has no spots and that s going to be our beginning.
And at the end, we have to have some kind of an ending, because they understand that
I give them a very precise story structure. Aristotle - so it s been around for a while,
and don't pick on Aristotle, either, okay, just don't. There s a beginning, which sets
up where we are, who we are. And then we have trouble, trouble, trouble and then we have
a denouement, which is a lovely word which means we have an ending that makes sense.
When we work within this very simple triad, set it up, give us a problem and solve it,
children starting off with something that s very easy to wrap even young minds around.
And I mean first and second graders. Once we re there and I say, for example, all
right, we have a giraffe that s escaped from a zoo, and it has no spots. What s going to
happen? And somebody immediately, of course, will say she needs to find her spots, or he
needs to find his spots. So there s our trouble. Well, how are we going to find spots? How
are we going to solve the problem? This is like two minutes long. Where are we going
to have this giraffe? New York. Okay, now how about the Brooklyn Zoo, based out of the
Brooklyn Zoo. So some have a street painter paint stripes,
paint - you know. Not stripes, we don t want a striped giraffe. Well, we could, that could
be a different story. We have others that say that the giraffe walks underneath somebody
that s painting a sign. And, oh, they go to a tattoo parlor. There s always that kid.
Or - or or - in this particular example, which I did use with a class this spring, this child
- and there s always that one kid - says, Well, what if like, like a big truck comes
by on the way back to the Zoo and it s filled with giraffes with no spots?
And it actually is like a kind of giraffe. And they just did it, and nobody had other
people. I think, just let them go lying enough and
they re going to come up with wonderful ideas. Once those kids start getting really excited,
as they do when we work together, whether as a group or one on one, you as a parent
with your child. Once they start getting excited, and they see that you re excited about their
idea, their story, okay, so this - this little zygote was birthed within their own minds
and then grew and grew and grew. They do the hard work. I start them off with a story,
and then the second thing that I have them do is not go right directly to writing, especially
if they are hesitant, resistant, they just hate writing.
I just tell them, tell me what happens in the right order. That s all I want to know.
You don t have to use punctuation; you don t have to capitalize. I m going to be on you
like white on rice later with that, but not right now. I want you to just tell me what
happens. It s a giraffe in the Brooklyn Zoo, it escapes,
it meets this, it meets this, it meets this. It finds this and this is how it ends. Okay,
now that you have in your head the actual plot, I want you to write your first draft.
I can t stop them. We run out of time. Cranky Nana does not lie. Can we just stay
like - can we just - I just got to finish my story. And usually it s that one child
that, you know, the teacher pulls me over and says, You re never going to get Joshua
to do anything. I m sorry, you know, he hates to write.
Why? Because we start with a story, something we can get behind. And if we think it s, like
it s ours and we have ownership of it, you re talking to a dyslexic. Yes, a dyslexic.
Go to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and you can read my story. And I will tell you, even
the children who struggle with writing, if they can fall in love with the story, will
do the hard work. And it doesn t have to be perfect; it just
has to get done. And the feeling you have when you finish something, especially something
that is incredibly difficult, is almost incomparable to any other feeling of achievement. So there,
says Cranky Nana.
For more information about teaching writing, please visit readingrockets.org.
Writing SOS is produced through a partnership of the National Education Association and
WETA.