I get a lot of writing from kids. I mean, they write a lot for me. And part of it is this, that I’m just not their teacher, right? It’s like how kids will behave way better for the babysitter, right? And oh, it’s not mom, okay, well then, I’ll do all the things that I’m supposed to do. And so that’s part of it.
But also I think that they don’t get an opportunity to write selfishly in school. There is so much prescriptive reading and prescriptive writing that I think isn’t necessarily good for them. I think that one of the things that I really like to encourage teachers to think about is using creative writing as a tool to build readers, because when kids are writing selfishly, when they are writing for their own interest and joy, they are thinking about the books that make them feel interested and joyful.
And it leads them back to the page. And when they can make something happen on the page, when they can think about a narrative arc and when they can think in terms of beginnings, middles and ends and when they can think in terms of you know laying the ground work for what’s going to happen later on, then they can start to see that happening in the books too and they start to be able to read like writers, right?
It’s sort of like that old truism I listen and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand. They are doing the work and they understand it in a different way. And it makes them a different kind of reader.