I love swimming in writing studies for weeks at a time with my students — immersing ourselves in mentor texts, gathering information, writing off the page, talking out our ideas, drafting, revising. But when the average writing study lasts 3-5 weeks, it’s hard to keep the momentum and excitement of seeing a piece through to completion. Last year, I dabbled with mini writing units between big genre studies, like writing our own Buzzfeed lists. But this year, I’m getting even smaller as I find ways to support tiny writing publication.
Inspired by Allison’s post last year about finding time in workshop by extending notebook time through a 5-day week, I have been using extended notebook times as opportunities for tiny writing studies. Before I tell you about what we have written, let me tell you why this works:
- We can be working on meaningful, publishable writing while we simultaneously work on our literature study.
- I am using time already set aside in my class.
- We can continuously ride the wave of publication — through big genre studies and though low-stakes tiny writing studies.
- I can experiment with pieces of writing in my classroom that normally wouldn’t make the genre study cut because of other demands.
- Students are getting more practice reading like writers & more exposure to the real world of writers.
Tiny Writing Study Logistics
For a tiny writing study, I use my regularly scheduled notebook time — the first 5-7 minutes of class when we play, explore, and discover in our notebooks. (If you want to know more about all the ways we use this time, we dedicate an entire chapter to it in Writing With Mentors, and you can check out our session on notebook time at last spring’s EdCollab Gathering.) Each day, we build on and expand our writing. By the end of our fifth class period, we have a piece of writing that is ready to publish.
Day 1 – Introduction & Mentor Text Immersion
On day 1, I direct students to a slew of mentor texts and ask them to skim, scan, and look around for 5-7 minutes to get a sense of the genre. I don’t specify which mentor texts they should look at because I want there to be variety. This will help make our noticings more thoroughly developed tomorrow.
Day 2 – Noticings
Next, I grab a marker and we make a list of our noticings on the board. How is this thing made? What is it composed of? What will they need to do to create something in kind?
Students have been learning how to make noticings since the very first week of school. This is awesome practice as they continue to practice and refine their reading-like-a-writer skills.
Students copy this list of noticings into their notebooks so that they have them as we work throughout the week.
Day 3 – Try one
In most cases, I reserve the middle day for trying — writing their own version of the mentor.
This often extends into homework. For example, when we did a “Humans of …” series, students needed to actually interview and photograph people outside of class. So students used the “Try One” class period to brainstorm and share interview questions. When we wrote haikus, students tried their hand at writing a few during notebook time, but then they selected their favorite for homework.
Day 4 – Revise
On the fourth day of a tiny writing study, we share and then revise. We keep the task of revision simple: make your writing better.
Day 5 – Publication
We keep publication simple, too. Publication simply means “going public” and sharing our work in some way. But you don’t need to have a big author’s celebration every time. Here are some simple ways we publish:
- Read-arounds
- Jotting favorite bits and golden lines on the white board for all to see
- Compiling a whole-class slideshow of writing
- Tweeting out our writing.
It is so easy for me to make publication an after-thought — a nice-to-do but not necessary. What I forget is that this is the step that takes my kids from students to real writers. This is where we get buy in and show students that their words are real and that their writing matters.
Four Tiny Writing Studies That Have Worked for Me
Ready to try this with your students next week?
The secret to a tiny writing study is in the size. The product has to be very, very small in order for students to successfully study the mentor texts and produce their own original piece. Here are four tiny writing studies that have worked for me:
Two-Sentence Horror Stories
This week, my ninth grade classes studied two-sentence horror stories. (You can find oodles of these on the web, but here are some I share with my students.) We noticed that there was a lot of sentence variety, that they built suspense, that they usually begin with something ordinary and then twist it into something scary in the second sentence.
Students wrote their own and then Tweeted them. You can see some of them here:
Haiku
Allison came up with the brilliant idea to teach reading like a reader versus reading like a writer through haiku — something so small and so concrete students could quickly see the differences between their readerly observations and their writerly observations.
Using mentor texts from The New York Times’ haiku contest, student made noticings and ultimate wrote their own haikus about places they love.
Humans of …
Based on Humans of New York, students interviewed and photographed people around a theme they invented (Humans of My Neighborhood or Humans of the Trinity Basketball Team or, my favorite, Humans of Teenage Drama). By the end of the week, students had composed three slides, each featuring an image and bit of an interview.
I compiled all of these into one giant slideshow that we enjoyed together.
Buzzfeed Lists
This is slightly bigger than tiny, but I’ve found that students are so well-versed in listicles that they can quickly pick this up and put it together.
Students worked on their own original list in the style of Buzzfeed. They incorporated images, gifs, and videos to support their list and boost reader engagement. Best of all, Buzzfeed allows you to submit your lists for publication on their site! Publishing for a big, wide Internet audience boosts students efforts in a race to see who will get published and who will get the most “likes”. One student even had his list featured for a day on the Buzzfeed main page!
Two More Ideas I will Try This Year
I’m constantly on the lookout for great tiny writing projects. Here are two more I want to try this year:
Letter to My Younger Self
The Player’s Tribune, a site started by Derek Jeter, features writing by pro athletes. What a gold mine! While only some of these pieces feature enough craft to really be used as technique-teaching mentor texts, many lead to big-time inspiration for our student writers.
I’m dying to have students look at the series Letter to My Younger Self, in which athletes look back and give themselves advice. Students will love finding the insightful, personal letters written by their favorite athletes and then composing their own letter.
Crowdsourcing Pitches
One way that real adults write is in the form of crowdsourcing pitches. Sites like Kickstarter and Donor’s Choose rely on savvy pitch-writing and story-telling to elicit funds from donors!
Using this as fodder for tiny writing would be so much fun. It’s a very authentic form of writing, and it also asks students to be inventive. What would you want to raise money for? Maybe a film you’ve been dying to make or a video game you want to produce or a book you want to self-publish … or maybe a car for your sixteenth birthday! Students will learn to write persuasively for strangers (or in order to persuade their parents!)
Let’s pool our resources! What ideas do you have for units of tiny writing? Leave a comment below, find us on Facebook, or Tweet me @RebekahOdell1.
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