Writing lessons at school this week

[ameliasmith]

The kids' school had its annual back-to-school night on Monday, where we sat in little chairs and listened to the teacher talk about the second grade curriculum. One thing was that they talk about "publishing" some of their work, and an editorial process which is really not much different from what I do with my books. The teacher laid out three steps; going over it yourself, peer feedback, and then teacher feedback. She says that the pieces they "publish" can take a month or more to complete. These are the ones that get laminated and sent home, mostly, that's what publication looks like in second grade. 

Anyway, that was a very "Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" moment.

Then we got the weekly "News and Notes" from the vice principal, which included this part (bolding mine): 

Thank you to all who were able to come to our annual open house. It’s a great way to celebrate the community we have here at WTS. Students were super excited to show off their work and their new classrooms, the book fair was a huge success - raising nearly $8,000 for our library and helping to fund our annual author visits, and it provided a great chance to catch up with each other after the busy start of the year.

I don't write for kids, but this is an interesting piece of data. This is just one quite well-funded public school, but really this is a great thing to know for authors who might be writing for, or thinking about writing for, kids. 

[Becca Mills]

That's cool, Amelia. What strikes me as particular interesting: the "making public" of student writing is a movement in composition studies at the college level. There are different ways to do it (student research and creative writing journals, blogs and other forms of web publication, submission of material to newspapers and other existing outlets, etc.), and not all programs have making-writing-public components. But it is thought to be a good thing to do, I think largely because it makes student writing feel "real," not like busywork or "writing to learn." It's fascinating to me to hear that this element of writing pedagogy has made it down to kids as young as second grade. I really wouldn't have expected that. Of course, schools have always shared student writing in different ways. But the language you're describing -- editing, peer-review, publication -- that comes come right out of the comp-rhet movement I'm talking about. It seems directly tied in.

[ameliasmith]

I find it a little odd, though, because this so-called publication isn't even public, just shared within the school. Still, it does make it seem more real.