To Write or Not to Write, That Should Never Be The Question

             I believe one of the most freeing and uplifting activities a person can do is sit down and write. Using writing as a form of stress relief, or a way to organize your thoughts, allows individuals to ease their minds and reflect, even if that is not the specific intention of the writing activity. As a future educator, I value writing greatly compared to the other strands of language and literacy. I believe that writing can and should be involved across all curriculum, because I see writing as a tool for many things.

Flickr User aysedmirhas. (May 25, 2015).“Writing”. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2fnUYKE

           I enjoy free writing exercises, and I think it a great way to get students to look at writing assignments not a chore. It also allows them to work on their sentence structure without having to prove any point other than what is on their mind. Creative writing, specifically writing involved in the arts is another great strategy to not only get students excited about writing, but also allows educators to plan lessons that are fun for students while achieving the main curriculum expectations. Lessons such as script or play writing allows students to use their creativity and write how they want to write, but they also must take into consideration the audience they are writing for as well as they must prof read, revise and identify strengths and weaknesses of their writing because it will read aloud by someone else. Brock’s Pinterest Account has a board specifically devoted to Arts and Drama where you can find numerous ideas on how to incorporate the dramatic arts into your writing based lesson pans. I specifically liked the post about how to build your own puppet stage on a classroom budget. Students could write short play scripts and be able to build their own puppets to act out their story. The link to the IRC’s Pinterest account can be found below :) 

Brock University IRC Pinterest Account

              Teaching writing is not limited to only pen and paper or typing in a Word Document, educators have an abundance of media and tech based software, apps and websites that they can use to make writing fun for their students. A great idea I came across was using twitter as a class to write a short story. Although the fact that each tweet can only be a total of 140 characters may seem like trivial when it comes to writing, I believe that the limit can be used to teach students a number of things in regards to how they structure their writing. An exercise like this teaches students how to focus on making their writing concise, too often students focus on trying to write in a way that makes them “sound” smart, but instead it makes their writing sound wordy and confusing.

                

              Writing is a main foundation when it comes to language arts in the education, and it is obviously a key item when it comes to teaching students how to be literate in the 21^st century. Students have more ways to write on their own compared to any other time, educators must take this fact and not only use it to create more engaging lessons, but also stress that students writing is an extension of who they are. This post has mostly focused on creative writing, that is because I believe that free writing and writing exercises that focus on having students write about what they want is crucial for their future as writers.

Thank you for reading!