For my summer curriculum grant, I am trying to connect with other teachers globally on the subject of fiction writing.  My first questions to my fellow teachers are:

Do you teach fiction writing in your classroom? 

If so, what pieces do your kids create?

In my class, my kids write a free choice story for Hot Chocolate House, and we Native American legends.  We also write poems in the spring. All other pieces are personal narratives or journaling.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

This April I celebrated my 1oth year here at North Shore. No, there wasn’t a parade or even an announcement about it. Many others have passed this mile marker. Besides, 10 years is no big deal when you look at colleagues who have given 40 years to this school. 40 years! Isn’t that amazing?

I started here an as assistant teacher in 3rd grade, filling in for someone who had left to do her student teaching. Next I assisted in JK (junior kindergarten), 2nd grade, 4th grade, and back to 3rd again. All of this time, I was preparing for a move up to head teacher, and I was honored enough to make that move up here! Last year, I co-taught as a head teacher in 2nd grade. This year I am also co-teaching, but I have moved up with my class to 3rd grade. This is wild because I am co-teaching with the wonderful teacher who I assisted that first spring of 1997, and the transition has been seamless.

So with all of those years gaining experience in various grades, meeting some wonderful children, and facing some tough challenges, I am ready to embark on a new quest this summer.

Last year, our school began funding summer curriculum grants. The idea is that teachers could be paid to spend some vacation time developing curricula that would be implemented in the following school year. The benefit to teachers (beside the extra funds) is that you are given the gift of uninterrupted time with colleagues to do creative work. The benefit to the school is that new and innovative ideas are being infused into our curricula, and teachers are growing and learning new things. It also gives you the opportunity to get to know other teachers better, which builds community.

The teachers who were awarded grants last summer were invited to present what they had done at an all-school faculty meeting after winter break. It was so inspiring, but also very intimidating! I knew that I wanted to work on something this summer, but what and with whom? During this time, my 3rd graders had begun a fiction writing unit. After doing personal narrative writing all fall, they were ready to spread their creative wings and were very excited! The culmination of the unit is the Hot Chocolate House. We set up the 3rd grade classroom to look like a coffee house from the 1960s. The kids dress as beatniks and we snap our fingers as kids present excerpts from their stories on the small stage standing in front of a microphone. It is great fun.

Anyway, I was having a lot of trouble editing some of the kids’ stories. As I read more of them, it hit me that kids today do not take their sense of narrative from reading good literature, but instead from T.V., social-networking websites, video games, etc. Of course, this didn’t happen overnight. We have always had the occasional child who wants to write a Pokemon story, but this year there seemed to be more stories like these than ever before. What was wrong with them? Characters popped in and out without introduction, description, or relevance to the main problem of the story. Events were disjointed from each other, lacking transition and explanation. Inanimate objects appeared for humorous purposes and made no sense to the reader. Some of the stories read like . . . well, like story frames for one of the new shows you can find on “Cartoon Network.” Cute and funny, but not much to say. Well, it didn’t take me too long before I knew this unit was what I needed to work on this summer.

While I was figuring this out, my co-teacher and the 2nd grade head teacher had already been discussing implementing a writing program called Units of Study for Primary and Intermediate Writers, a series of books written by Lucy Caulkins. My co-teacher had already been to a writing conference in which she presented, and came back very inspired to try changing our curriculum. We had already been using her idea of “small moment writing” in the fall with our class, and the 2nd grade teacher was also ready to try this program with her class as well. Lucy Caulkins is at the top of her field, but she doesn’t introduce fiction writing until 6th grade in her curriculum. While we understand and respect her choices for doing this, we believe that we would be denying our young children some great opportunities for expressing their imaginative ideas. Consider how much your imagination changed from lower school to middle school!

So the three of us joined forces to develop a curriculum that would balance fiction and non-fiction writing for grades 2 and 3. We had to write a lengthy proposal, and we were awarded a grant to spend some time this together summer on our writing units.

I got a great book that I have just started reading called The Whole Story: Crafting Fiction in the Upper Elementary Grades by Karen Jorgensen. There are some great tips which I will share on this blog in future posts. But, the main reason that I have created this blog is so I can begin to network with other elementary teachers on a global scale. I am hoping to start gathering answers to questions as we meet to discuss this topic in cyberspace.

I now have officially entered the blogging world.  Yay me!  I am a 3rd grade teacher at North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, IL.  I am starting this blog as part of my Summer Curriculum Grant.  I will let you know more about the grant and its focus soon so stay tuned!