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| My Murray Cards |
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| Writing Timeline |
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| Digital Timeline |
I really liked the Murray Cards activity today. It was great for me to see how it helped me find a topic to write about. The first two index cards I kept freewriting but then discarding my ideas and starting anew. I liked how I always had that option to make a new start if a topic didn't grab my attention. It's funny to look back and see the different topics and to trace the tangents of my brainstorming. I first wrote about my best friend, then about libraries, then about Japanese shut-ins (all over the place, I know!).
I thought it was helpful to have the listener act very, very enthusiastic and interested; I think that it would help my students to learn how to react to someone's writing pieces and help reluctant sharers feel more comfortable. Giving the listeners specific questions to ask like "What do you intend to do next" and "What do my readers need to know that I haven't told them" was beneficial in giving examples of concrete, foward-moving inquiry. I think students (and me as the teacher) often have trouble coming up with ways of responding to a piece of writing.
At first I got a little frustrated because I felt like I kept coming up with superficial topics that I wasn't that really interested in digging into but not having to labor over the spurts of writing for too long helped and I liked that I didn't feel wedded to a topic. I could always start anew. And I felt more motivated because these were topics that I was coming up with; no one was pushing me to write about anything in particular.
Sharing with a partner and seeing how these directions and prompts could apply to someone else's widely different idea was revealing. Being able to get out of my headspace for a few minutes and really listen to what was going through someone else's head was a much-needed shift after those three minutes of writing. i think this activity will really help my students find a starting point for writing that is meaningful to them on a personal level.
I agree that the "acting" excited helped to fuel the discussion. I think whenever we learn new activities or respond to writing it can be hard to know what to tell the author. If we are told up front that we need to be excited and positive, it sets the stage for the discussion.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, I felt like the pauses in writing allowed us to think aloud with a partner. It was like the partner journeyed with us through our thinking process to see if the topic was something we needed to spend more time on or if it was simply a thought that needed no further analysis for writing.
Thanks for the great lunch conversation and article link! I'm glad we will be working together in a group!
I'm not sure if you read my post from yesterday, Jessica, but I was jumping all over the place, too! It's nice to know that someone else was having sporadic and "unimportant" thoughts. Like you, the thing that kept me going was knowing that I could always trash what I had and start fresh with a new idea. I think we often don't give our students enough time to do the same. In our attempt to cover everything that needs to be covered, we forget about how long it can take to discover something we truly want to write about. If we allow our students the time to explore and discard several different thoughts or topics, we might have better, more engaged writers and therefore more meaningful writing.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you, Jessica. It is so funny, I always (eventually) leave the Murray Card activity excited about a direction(s) to go with my writing, but almost always I begin dreading the process at card #2! And I just feel like I am total deadweight until somehow something eventually pokes through the clouds on one of the last cards. I can not even count the number of times this has happened to me. #weird #buthelpful
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