I'm currently in the middle of a term's residency at a school in Staffordshire. I visit every Wednesday to work with a class of year 5 children, some of whom have previously found it difficult to engage in the process of writing. My role, using drama as a stimulus, is to get them started on the road to seeing themselves as writers.
They're brilliant kids, with plenty of life and stories to tell. They engage in the drama with enthusiasm and no little skill. They 'get' stories and characters and motivations in quite an adult way. Last week we had a 'village meeting' to discuss the issue of an abandoned wolf pup being allowed to stay with a character. One boy, a reluctant writer, was superbly articulate in role as a villager in a way he may find difficult still on paper.
If we 'teach' speaking and thinking, through drama and the fantastic 'Philosophy For Children' developed by Sapere (google it) surely the skills to commit that thinking to paper will come much more easily? My conviction that this kind of active learning, married to core writing skills, stops kids becoming bored by prescriptive literacy lessons with their tedious targets and quick fix strategies for adding two adjectives or starting sentences with an adverb . . . yawn. It may get the school a level four but it won't turn their learners into writers for life.
Back in the class, we make a book with a title page and they draft a killer opening paragraph. The results are promising. I talk about some of the relevant issues I have to deal with when trying to engage readers in my stories. They begin to realise the challenges but aren't daunted. There's no test at the end, I assure them.
But the tests are there in the background in every primary school in the country. They skew the way learning is presented to children so that those who are difficult to engage are more likely to get less of what they need.
When it's time for lunch, many of them want to show me stories they've written at home or ask me questions about writing. I show them my notebooks with scruffy handwriting and scribbles and drawings and stubs of ripped out pages. They seem impressed that I find writing a struggle too, but perhaps they're beginning to see why I stick at it.
Who says children don't like writing?
