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The Game of Prompt Writing

The Game of Prompt Writing. Kim Buice SWP Summer 2010. Consider this Prompt. You go into your grandmother’s attic and find a trunk. You open it. Write about what you find inside.

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The Game of Prompt Writing

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  1. The Game of Prompt Writing Kim Buice SWP Summer 2010

  2. Consider this Prompt • You go into your grandmother’s attic and find a trunk. You open it. Write about what you find inside.

  3. “… well meaning teachers hope students will get better at prompt writing by simply writing to a different prompt everyday. In writing workshop, teaching should focus on good writing in any genre. The challenge is to teach writing well, and then teach children to transfer that learning.” Janet Angelillo Writing to the Prompt

  4. Traditional Prompt Writing • Encourages conformity. • Decreases independence. • Discourages risk taking. • Decreases ownership. • Produces mediocre writing.

  5. How can we keep this from happening?

  6. Idea #1 – Teach the Rubric

  7. Organization – Up Close At thebeginning more time passes, then after a while finally

  8. Content & Development – Up Close

  9. Voice – Up Close – Your Turn!

  10. Idea #2 – Teach Them to Read the Prompt • Janet Allen – RAFT R - Role – What role(s) will the student assume as a writer? A – Audience – Who is the audience for the writing. F – Format –What format will the writing take (comic strip, letter to the editor, feature article, poem)? T – Topic – What is the topic? What are the question(s) to be answered?

  11. Let’s Try It Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below. Many persons believe that to move up the ladder of success and achievement, they must forget the past, repress it, and relinquish it. But others have just the opposite view. They see old memories as a chance to reckon with the past and integrate past and present. Assignment: Do memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present?

  12. Teaching Kids to Read the Prompt Disclose the details about a time when you encountered a startling incident with a domestic quadruped.

  13. If you could relish a respite from your mundane existence, what locale would you proceed to? Depict every aspect in detail.

  14. Idea #3 – Make it a Game! • 77% of adolescents play video games daily • success in video games requires a complex set of problem solving strategies • we can transfer these strategies to the “game” of prompt writing Janet Angelillo Writing to the Prompt: When Students Don’t Have A Choice

  15. Gaming Elements & Skills Useful for Prompt Writing • Being ready to engage with a topic (game) as an intellectual exercise. • Being alert and quick to respond. • Activating prior knowledge about a topic (game). • Considering many possibilities (using some, discarding others). • Deciding on the type of game or response needed. • Revising when necessary – even starting over. • Meeting and overcoming obstacles. • Determining the degree of difficulty/amount of energy required.

  16. Being ready to engage with a topic as an intellectual exercise. • What if you don’t have a grandmother? Or she doesn’t have an attic? Can you think of one you have seen on tv or in a movie? Take it! • Think about what the trunk looks like – even if you are not sure – picture it in your mind

  17. Being alert and quick to respond. • I have to get interested. Maybe I can sketch some pictures to get some ideas. • No, I can’t say the trunk is empty!

  18. Activating prior knowledge. • Do I have friends or neighbors with attics? • What stories have I heard about grandmothers? About attics? About trunks? • I can take anyone’s story and make it my own.

  19. Considering many possibilities… • A scary story I saw that took place in an attic? • A pirate’s treasure chest? • A story about my grandmother dying? • Oh, my friend said her aunt saves EVERYTHING in the attic – what would that look like?

  20. Deciding on the required response. • Not a description of an attic • Not a story about my grandmother • Not a feature article about types of trunks • I have 2 pages – I’d better get some details ready.

  21. Revising when necessary. • Revise the plan before I even start writing. • Revise my draft when it is finished. • Check back with the prompt to be sure I answered ALL parts of the question.

  22. Meeting and overcoming obstacles. • I have more than one idea, so I do some prewriting with both to decide which will turn out better. • When I pull something out of the box in the story, I have to visualize it so I can tell about it. If I can’t picture it in my mind, maybe I should pll out something else.

  23. Did we use the same strategies?

  24. In Closing • Katie Wood Ray – “A study of testing should be a study of process not product.” • Janet Angelillo – “Because writing workshops focus on strengthening writing strategies and thereby raise the bar for all writing, they are the perfect way to teach students to write well to prompts.”

  25. Resources • Allen, Janet. Tools for Teaching Content Literacy. Stenhouse Publishers, 2004. • Angelillo, Janet. Writing to the Prompt: When Students Don’t Have a Choice. Heinemann, 2005. • Ray, Katie Wood. Study Driven. Heinemann, 2006.

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