Student choice… student confusion!

Tania Weinbrenner
Sep 5, 2018 · 4 min read

Ah the grand ideas… sometimes they work exactly as we intend, other times, not so much. The grand idea of an essay every three weeks is moving along, although not as smoothly as I had originally anticipated. I was so excited about giving students choice, I never even stopped to consider that some students would be so confused!

The very first thing we did was “I can’t imagine my life without…” paper to get our brains working on things we absolutely love! Thank you Pintrest! Students loved completing this page.

How we began….

As you can see, there is so much that these students love. The most entertaining part was how much direction the students were looking for. They wanted specific numbers of how many things to include, how to draw, what to write. I loved giving them the freedom to show their true selves. This was also a fantastic way to get to know my new class!

Once we completed the page, we chose one topic from our things that we love page and began our 1–18 chart.

For our purposes, we only really looked at the three rows we completed. This form is very open, and students really struggled with the creative side of this form. Many students were really upset with me because I did not tell them exactly what to write about. Quite a few students chose to write about school because it was the model we did as a class.

After this, I asked them to write me a great story in which something was expressed about the topic they chose. They were asked to write a narrative. Oh the faces… and the questions! “What do you mean?” “What do we write about?” I told them they already had their topic and an idea to write about.

The first week, they were not happy with me. They were not confident in their stories, nor were they excited to share with anyone, even though, they claimed it was a “great story!” We spent the next couple weeks working on narratives and story structure, as well as precise language, conflict, climax, resolution… many of the components. Students then needed to analyze their “great story” for the basic components. As we went through this process, my favorite question was “Can I change my story?” To which the answer is always… yes! You are the author, you are in control! The look on their faces was priceless. These students who were so hesitant to write turned into writers who were beyond excited. What started as half a page of a story is turning into chapters with rich characters and descriptive dialogue!

Our final draft is due Friday… then we move on to informative. We have covered so many of our required standards and it has been so meaningful to the students because they are immediately applying it to their own writing. I can’t wait to share their finished product! Thank you for joining me on this adventure.

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