Teacher Tuesday: Teachers Write 2018 with Kate Messner

Writing teachers--here's a summer writerly thing to do; I mean in between reading and naps and getting ready for next year and organizing your house and catching up with friends and reading. And naps.

Kate Messner, author and former teacher, is hosting  an online summer writing camp for teachers.  There will be daily prompts and ideas given, with the chance to win prizes (!), share your work via the comments section and have other teachers and writers respond, and to hone your writing skills so that you are a better teacher of writing.

You can find the beginning post (from July 9, 2018) here, but even if you don't sign up and participate publicly, there will be great ideas for you to try on your own or with your students. 

I'm geeked about the first prompt (a cobra capture!) and want to write a whole book around it--I'm pretty sure agents and publishers will be flooded with books (in the style of Kate's book, BREAKOUT, of course!) from other teacher-writers who feel the same way.  I will refrain and stick with the prompts for the month.  Maybe. 

After you've read Kate's blog post and the article about the cobra, consider this for classroom creative writing use (middle school/high school, though 3rd and 4th graders might love a modified version) when having them try out different points-of-view.

• As a whole class, discuss the arc the article followed--the beginning, the middle and the end of the story as reported. 
• Make sure all students are clear about the setting (Florida).
• As a class, brainstorm the characters that could be found in the story arc and assign each of your students one or more of the characters.
• Students could write journal entries, text messages, newspaper articles, news reports, a script of a reenactment of the discovery and capture, etc. within the framework of the reported arc and the setting 
• Have students place each part they write within the story arc, giving it a specific date and time so that it can be placed in the time line of the group project correctly.
• Students could work individually or collaboratively to create a fictional story based on the events.  The finished group writing project could be interdisciplinary and multimedia, with the students using art work, scientific facts, vlogs, recording the reenactment and news reports, etc.  

There are many examples in the comments on Kate's blog post that your students could use for inspiration--text messages, poems, letters, etc.  I chose to wrote a journal entry from the point-of-view of one of the student stuck inside--there were other teachers who chose similarly--we know our students well, I guess!

September 12, 2015

Miss Scholar said we had to write about the snake thing during what *would* be our recess. She’s all excited because she thinks things like this are fantastic…she says that it should give us such scope for our imagination (?????). Also she keeps singing about blue shoes and curling her lip. And saying thank you, thank you very much. She’s losing it. Probably because of indoor recess. Anyway, I chose a haiku. Cuz it’s short–haha. Here goes:

As if King Cobra
wants to be anywhere near
a noisy playground.

Dang. She said it doesn’t show enough of nature and that I should journal a bit more. As if I want to dig deeper when I could be playing basketball. Outside. In NATURE.

Indoor recess stinks.
I want fresh air and freedom.
Let us go outside.

She didn’t go for that one either. I quit.

©2018 Rebekah Hoeft