Teaching Awareness through Writing, Teaching Writing through Awareness

Writing is all in the details and when we’re focused on everything around us, and inside us than we are aware. Awareness is when we are focused on the present state using all your senses, not making one sense more important than the other. This can be an exercise in writing. In exercising this skill you can also teach your young writer the benefits of being present, and fully living each moment. How to be an Explorer of the World, written by Keri Smith, provided many ideas for this post. It’s a perfect companion to the previous post, Teaching Writing as an Art, and Student Lead Learning’s philosophy to teaching reading and writing.

Everything is interesting, look closer. As your child is living their days, eating their breakfast, suggest they focus on their chewing, the flavors, the fragrance of your morning coffee and the sounds of the pancake griddle. Keep a journal near them and suggest the write down every sensation as they are living. I wouldn’t expect this all day, every day, but for short bursts of time, give it a try and refer to it later for their stories or articles.

Write from someone else’s eyes. In that breakfast journal your child might have what that breakfast tastes like and looks like but suggest they write from another person’s point of view. What is their father seeing as he is flipping those pancakes? What might he be smelling, thinking or tasting? Does he taste samples of his first warm pancakes, fresh off the griddle? Is he mad at his messy flip that caused an imperfect circle? Describe what that may feel like pretending he is that person; take liberties and make assumptions.

Create a Personal dialogue with your environment. Suggest your child choose one item in your environment and pretend she or he is having a conversation with it. What might she or he say to that item? If it’s her favorite glass cup, adorned with blue flowers, she might say you look so pretty today. What do you have planned? Imagine what that item might say back. This encourages imagination and teaches poetic language. She could also illustrate this with a comic strip format and then develop this into a short movie script.

Observe movement. Choose one moving object or your own and describe the movement breaking up body parts. Don’t just say I looked at the cat as it stood on my porch; instead say, my eyes met this four legged morning visitor as her paws leaped over the wooden banister, and walked on the tightrope of with the ease of me walking on flat ground.

Use all of your sense in your awareness. For the younger child, encourage them to complete a chart with the five senses. During their writing through “awareness time”, make sure they are aware of all their senses and journal them as best as they can. They may need a thesaurus to describe some things in detail. If something smells burnt, they might replace or add tingled my throat, tickled my nose, smoky or charcoal.

Awareness of thoughts and feelings. What is the writer feeling and thinking? When feeling, where do you feel in your body? If you’re mad are you feeling red in parts of your body? Are you feeling hot? If you could draw it, than draw it. What thoughts are contributing to those feelings? How do you feel when you focus on those thoughts? How do you feel when your focus moves toward other parts of your world? The writer will start to see how thoughts affect feelings and to be aware and not afraid of different feelings. Ultimately it improves both awareness and one’s writing craft.

Teach the Art of Writing with 10 Easy Steps

As our educational standards become higher and more competitive, creativity and free writing is becoming more and more extinct in our schools. As parents we need to make up for that missing link. We all know creativity is what our children need to grow into lifelong learners, so let’s not wait for someone else to instill the love of writing. The below steps might help us put the art back into writing.

1. Write, Write, Write! Like Malcolm Gladwell, author of the Outliers says, you need to spend 10,000 hours on a skill before you get really good at it. That especially applies to writing. Children should be writing as much as possible. It would be great if they had a choice over what to write. If they have hours of homework than encourage them to use the weekend to write something of their own choosing. If your homeschooling encourage them to write a lot throughout their days and weekends.

2. Freewriting should be most of their writing which means they should just write with no prompts or topics unless they ask; but it’s best if your child just writes without a prompt. Let their creativity take them wherever their mind wants to take it. They will surprise themselves with where their imagination goes.

3. Reading, reading and reading! A writer should be reading as much as they’re writing. They should be reading all genres and that will help them see all forms of writing, with different sentence structures, vocabulary with rich language and those crafts will than be absorbed in their own writing. I remember when my son said one day, “I read that metaphor and it was so beautiful I wanted to use it in my own writing.”

4. Borrow fascinating words or phrases they run into and keep them in a journal. They could make a section in a reading journal that’s just for “borrowed phrases”. As they’re reading they could add to that section. When it’s time to write they could use those words or phrases in their own writing. Eventually they will longer have to borrow and it will come natural for them to form their own fascinating words or phrases.

5. Describe a moment in depth instead of doing a long free write; some days they can carry the notebook and when they see something they could describe in depth, encourage them to stop and write about. For example, while at dentist’s office they might write a story about someone who is waiting in the waiting room, based on what they look like or how they’re acting; or something as simple as a ray of light shining through the window. That could be an entire paragraph that starts off a hopeful day.

6. Sign your child up for a Writing Group. Following is a link for groups mostly in New Jersey, meetup.com http://www.meetup.com/NJ-Homeschooled-Readers-and-Writing-Groups but if you’re outside of New Jersey click on suggest a Meetup with your suggested location and suggest your child’s friends sign up. Look for a local Writing Tutor to facilitate the group. Kids learn best from each other with an adult facilitating; the tutor can take a back seat while students help each other improve. The can read their writing to each other and make suggestions that are constructive.

7. Create an audience around your child’s writing. Organize a Poetry Slam where students can read and celebrate each other’s poems. Kids love to be validated by their peers and would respond positively to the attention. Publish their short stories or biographies with IlluStory company or other companies that publish books at a very low cost. You could also make their published books with construction paper or cardboard and than share them with family and friends. To have others admire ones work adds a purpose and excitement they will respond to.

8. Give your young writer a meaningful purpose with which they will receive a response. One of my proudest moments as when upon coming home from the park, my son was disappointed by the many deep potholes in the park where we rode bikes. This caused him so much distress he decided to write the town mayor. We also got into the habit of writing to people we admired. Everyone from the Tim Burton to Bill Gates. Many times we received letters back or signed autograph pictures. That showed that writing has a purpose beyond homework.

9. Post your child’s writing on websites where others, including other peers, can provide feedback. It’s been my experience the feedback is not only helpful, but encouraging to the writer. Websites like Teen Ink are very friendly to teen writers.

10. Praise before making suggestions for improvement. Point out what your child did well so they can feel good about their work. Leave grammar revisions for the end. Work on developing content before addressing spelling, capitalization and punctuation. This will encourage your child to write more and take risks using words they are not familiar with. If they are continuously reprimanded for their spelling they are less likely to use new words.

I hope these suggestions help; let me know how they worked out or if you have some other strategies that have worked for your family.