Kelly Gallagher – Write Like This Clinic
Introduction
As teachers we model concepts and activities for students’ everyday. In “Write Like This” Kelly Gallagher reminds us to model writing to help students become successful writers. Students learn best when the teacher models writing, while thinking out loud in front of them, just like we model reading strategies.
Gallagher reminds us we are the best writer in the classroom and our students need to see us work through the writing process to understand it isn’t always easy and never perfect in one draft.
Gallagher presents three “core” beliefs in his book:
Read – Reading provides a knowledge base students can use in their writing
Analyze - Look at good examples (mentor text) of the writing you are asking students to do and identify what works, why it is a good example
Emulate - Students will use the mentor text as a guide for their own writing
The keys to successful writing are:
- Helping students understand and identify the purposes for writing
- Teacher modeling the writing assignment in front of students talking through the process
- Allowing students to read, analyze and emulate strong mentor text at their level
- Write every day
His philosophy for writing divides writing into 6 distinct purposes and uses mentor texts to develop writing skills.
The 6 purposes for writing:
- Take a Stand or Propose a Solution
- Inquire and Explore
- Analyze and Interpret
- Express and Reflect
- Inform and Explain
- Evaluate and Judge
Common Core Standard the clinic will focus on
The ideas presented in this strategy can be used across the content areas. This clinic has been designed to demonstrate how this strategy can be used to meet one part of the Language Arts common core standards for narrative writing. We selected this standard because we see it as the key to good writing and critical thinking. We also felt students mastering this portion will be successful in expressing themselves on district writing prompts, future written state assessments, increasing their vocabulary and clearly articulating their thoughts and ideas in all forms of written and verbal communication.
Writing Standard – Narrative Writing- Students will write a narrative to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.
Section D states
By 8th Grade – Students will use precise words and phrases, relevant descriptive details, and sensory language to capture the action and convey experiences and events.
Progression-
- 5th Grade – Students will use concrete words and phrases, and sensory details to convey experiences and events precisely.
- 6th Grade – Students will use precise words and phrases, descriptive and sensory details to convey experiences and events.
- 7th Grade – Students will use precise words and phrases, relevant descriptive details, and sensory language to capture the action and convey experiences and events.
- 8th Grade – Students will use precise words and phrases, relevant descriptive details, and sensory language to capture the action and convey experiences and events.
Express and Reflect – The writer
- Expresses or reflects on his or her own life and experiences
- Often looking backward in order to look forward
Gallagher’s book begins with the Express and Reflect purpose for writing. This purpose provides excellent opportunities to teach students to write creatively using descriptive words, event sequences, and relevant details.
We will focus on Expressive and Reflective Writing by starting out with the six-word memoir (Pg. 25). It originated in SMITH Magazine (). Students are asked to write their memoirs in exactly six words. Begin by sharing aloud to generate discussion some of the following with your students:
6 Word Memoirs
Birth, childhood,
Adolescence, adolescence,
Adolescence, adolescence . . .
Painful nerdy kid,
Happy nerdy adult
Mistakes were made,
But smarter now
Sweet wife, good sons-
I’m rich
Life was but a dream,
Merrily
Blogging is easy.
Writing is hard.
Afraid of everything.
Did it anyway
Learned reading, writing,
Forgot arithmetic
Still have not learned to swim
Boys liked her.
She preferred books.
I’m ten, and have an attitude.
I colored outside the lines.
Ran away with the circus;
Never returned
Hockey is not just for boys
Big, little sister,
Stuck in the middle.
Born bald. Grew hair.
Bald again.
Five feet, but in your face.
My second grade teacher was right.
Can’t read all the time.
Bummer.
I didn’t skateboard
Nearly often enough
Made some good choices,
Got lucky.
Ten strikes against me,
Hit homerun.
Wife has cats.
Husband’s clothes furry.
Never been kissed.
Don’t want to.
Can’t chew gum without blowing bubbles.
Friend.
Boyfriend.
Ex-boyfriend.
Friend.
Friend’s boyfriend.
Finally learned “weird” is a compliment.
Day: average girl/boy
Night: gaming addict
Texting in class lost my phone.
Late to school every single day.
It was an honest mistake,
Really.
Me plus brother equals total disaster.
She’s prettier,
But I have personality.
Couldn’t sing
So played the drums.
Smoke detectors
Taught me to cook.
A purring cat makes everything better.
Guitar string snapped. I kept playing.
The Beatles really said it all.
My brain’s a box of crayons.
I miss when boys had cooties.
Tired of being the smart kid.
I always spell my name backwards. Hannah
I think in full, correct sentences.
School.
Soccer.
Sweat.
Rinse.
Homework.
Repeat.
Identify more with lyrics than people.
Staining my clothes:
Spaghetti and chocolate.
Now always thinking
In six word phrases.
I don’t rock;
Guitar Hero
Lies.
Cold Pop Tart;
Messy hair,
Running late.
My life story: to be continued
Then share a few that you’ve written:
Started a family, surrounded by boys
Read a book; smarter than yesterday
A little nervous about teaching today
Hope you learn a lot today
Then ask your students to draft their own versions:
If they can’t come up with anything suggest they use this as a start:
All things considered I’m doing ______.
I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how quickly students embrace the six-word memoir. Kids that never wrote before will be successful with this.
Once students have mastered this you can have them write six-word memoirs for anyone that they’ve read about. It can be a character in a book, an explanation of a scientific or mathematical equation and a person in history.
Work Space to write your own six-word memoir(s).
From 6 words to 140 Characters (Pg. 26)
Gallagher uses a progression of writing activities to build up a student’s understanding of a given writing style leading them to a larger expressive piece of writing. To combine writing with students’ interest in social media the next activity will use the format of a Twitter message to help students continue to refine their thoughts of expression using words that show exact actions and detailed meaning. Twitter messages help students achieve the standard targets of effective use of precise, descriptive, sensory language.
When using this in the classroom begin by making sure all students understand that a Twitter message is composed of 140 characters (letters, numbers, punctuation and spaces). We have included a graphic organizer to use that will allow the students to count the characters in their message. You can also use a computer and a word document at the bottom of the document click on “words” to see character count with spaces. There are also several fake tweet website students can use (but be warned they don’t always limit them to 140 characters) and are sometimes blocked by tech support. You could even create a class twitter feed and allow the students to practice on the real thing. There are also websites that will tell you how to print out an entire twitter feed so if you have the students tweet to a class feed you can then print and discuss as a group.
The following activity could be used to continue to build students competence in personal expressive and reflective writing.
Memoir Tweets:
Step One: Pose the question or state the topic you would like students to respond or Tweet about: Summer Memories
Step Two: Show students some Tweets on the subject. Sometimes you will need to create the mentor text (in this case tweets) if you can’t find any on your topic. Twitter can be searched for comments on a particular subject – provide students with those on paper to look at and read.
Mentor Tweets from Twitter:
- The simplest things make the best memories, late night ice cream and hanging out with my best friend. (103)
- Red light, green light as the yard goes dark, dirty feet from running barefoot, the sound of crickets as I fall asleep. (122)
- I miss the summer nights of my childhood, when the only thing that mattered was how many lightening bugs I could catch before bed. (132)
- Screaming through sprinklers, flapping sandals, sparkling windmills, donkey rides, swing boats and merry-go-rounds, the summer I was 10. (138)
Step Three:
Talk over the mentor tweets with the students; identify what about them was specific, sensory or very descriptive. Allow students to make suggestions that would make the tweets even more specific without changing the meaning or going over the character count.
Step Four:
Create some tweets of your own in front of the students about your summer memories, talking through the process of picking descriptive, sensory and exact words.
Step Five:
Ask students to close their eyes and picture something they did this summer. They should think of an exact moment during the memory they want to explain in their Tweet and then have them Tweet using the graphic organizer or digital resource.
Step Six:
Allow students to share and then working in small groups have them look at others Tweets and pick out the descriptive, sensory and specific details and offer suggestions to make the details even more specific.
Across the curriculum
This activity would work well when discussing characters for a book study or having students display what they know about a person from history, science, or math by having them tweet a response as that person.
Work space to write your own Tweets
Twitter Message Graphic Organizer
Each space below is one character (letter, number, punctuation mark, or space) in your message
______
______
______
______
______
______
______
______
______
______
Favorite Mistakes (Pg. 29)
After dabbling with six-word memoirs, 140 character tweets it’s time to move students into a more developed piece. Kelly Gallagher brings in and plays Sheryl Crow’s song “My Favorite Mistake,” which has a catchy chorus:
Did you know when you go
It’s the perfect ending
To the bad day
I was just beginning.
When you go
All I know is
you’re my favorite mistake. (1988)
Playing off the idea that we all have a favorite mistake in our lives Kelly introduces the students to a mentor text: Jessanne Collin’s “A Mistake That Should Last a Lifetime”. It is:
Removable tattoo ink makes it easy to erase romantic failing and youthful indiscretions. Why would I want to do that?
This Valentine’s Day, thanks to the advent of removable tattoo ink, couples can inscribe each other’s names into their skin without that nagging fear of “forever.” It’s practical but unromantic, the fringe culture equivalent of a prenup.
If only I’d put off my quarter-life crisis until this year, maybe I wouldn’t be living with my own flawed tattoo: blurry, bumpy with scar tissue, haloed with a permanent blue bruise. I’ve spent the past few years learning to love it-not an easy task for someone who color-codes her email, alphabetizes her bookshelves and tweezes compulsively. But as I read about removable tattoo ink recently, flipping through Time’s “Best Inventions of 2007,” I realized I’m not sorry my ink is permanent. I may have a messed up tattoo, but I have no regrets.
It was a cold April afternoon when I walked into a random Lower East Side tattoo shop and rolled up my sleeve. I showed the artist where I’d inscribed in felt tip pen on the inside of my left wrist, the phrase “break to keep fixing” a lyric by the 90’s punk band Jawbreaker. The artist swabbed the marker from my skin and had me rewrite the phrase with an aqua Sharpie. By then I’d written it dozens of times, trying to get it just right. This time, the one that mattered, I scrawled it nervously and told him I was ready. He sat me in a dingy basement, pulled out tools that I could only hope had been properly sterilized and popped in a metal CD at full volume. It was over before the first song was.
Back in my Brooklyn kitchen I removed the bandage and rinsed my wrist with antibacterial soap. I realized then that my word, true to my handwriting, began in neatly printed letters and morphed by the end into script. Spooked that I hadn’t noticed this until it was too late, I read that four letter phrase for a solid hour, waiting for a spelling error to materialize. None did, and I bravely reassured myself that this quirk just made it more “me.” But the permanence of the act I’d committed was sinking in. This time, it couldn’t simply be wiped away and written again.
Of course, fear of regret was the reason I’d waited until I was 25 to get my first tattoo. Fear of regret is, in fact, arguably the biggest modern risk of the popular practice, and a technology that erases it from the equation is likely to be a profitable one. Named with marketing in mind, Freedon-2 ink, which hit the market in several cities in late 2007, is made from biodegradable dye encapsulated in tiny plastic pellets. A glass in case of change of heart. After a single laser treatment, the plastic dissolves, the ink is absorbed into the body and the design vanishes.
In contrast to the painful, costly and variously effective multiple laser treatments required to remove traditional ink, it sounds like a miracle-and perhaps a frustration for the 17 percent of already tattooed American who say they’d undo theirs if they could. Angelina Jolie may have the means to continually reword her body art, but most of us don’t. We’ll be living out our years with the histories of our youthful indiscretions and failed romances written on our skin.
My own indiscretion wasn’t impulsive, I’d stewed over the idea for years. I’m a textbook Virgo-over analytical to the point of being indecisive, and indecisive to the point of becoming impatient. I’d shaved my head with just a month to go before my high school valedictory speech in my tiny New England town because it was on my list of things to do as a teenager. So, too, with my first real office job and the sense that I was being absorbed into the anonymous Manhattan professional class, I felt like my dissipating youth would be wasted if I never got around to getting a tattoo. Or maybe I thought that a little act of adolescent rebellion would buy me a few more years before I had to really grow up.
Either way, I awoke that spring morning with an emotional itch so strong, I got out of work, looked up the address of the tattoo shop online and hopped on the train to the city. I’d been in New York for half a year and I felt like I was hatching, crawling from the crumbles of one life toward a new one. As they had in disparate times of heartbreak, depression and angst, the lyrics spoke to me: “This is the cure/same as the symptom/simple and pure/break to keep fixing.” I looked to them, now quite literally, to guide my course of action. They explained me to myself. They even explain, on some level, what happened next.
I picked the scab.
It was a nasty one. My friendly anonymous artist apparently dug a little too deep with the needle. Crusted over, the ink began to bleed, and the letters blurred. At some point I accidentally banged my wrist against the kitchen counter, loosening the scab prematurely. “Don’t touch it!” everyone said, but I couldn’t help myself. I ran my fingers over it compulsively as it peeled and flaked. I knew better, of course. But like many things I encountered, I just couldn’t leave it alone, An ink-stained piece of skin bearing the letter “T” came off completely. I blew it off my fingertip as if it were any eyelash.
The way I felt about it changed from moment to moment, long after it was finally healed. Sometimes it looked puffy and frayed and my stomach would sink, I’d have this on me for the rest of my life. At my wedding. In my coffin. I’d forever be explaining it. What it meant, why it look the way it looked. I’d be enduring the scoffs of my younger, heavily tattooed brother and unconvincing reassurances of my best friends. I sometimes found myself eyeing the laser removal ads on the subway, considering the damage I could do to my credit.