The most important thing that young writers can do to develop their skills is write, write, and write some more.
In conjunction with writing, young writers should read great writing: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, jokes, text messages…. The form doesn’t actually matter. The more great writing they read, the more the rhythm of language will take root in their heads.
But finally, young writers can be really inspired by books about writing and reading. Below are a few of my favorites for young writers of a variety of ages.
The two adult writers of this book address kid writers as equals: fellow writers struggling to find out what they want to say and to say it well. My students love the advice in this book and they love the “I Dare You” prompts sprinkled throughout.
This is a book full of fun, inspiring prompts. My students love it. But I do ask them not to actually rip the pages…
Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity
Ray Bradbury was probably the single most inspiring writer to me as a young writer. I didn’t discover this book until I was looking for a good book on writing for my more advanced writing students. This is not for novice writers or readers, and at times Bradbury can be a bit bawdy. (One of the pieces is entitled “Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle”!) But my advanced students love it as much as I do. It would be a great one to read along with reading the books that Bradbury references in his essays.
It often takes a whole semester before students realize what all these stories have in common: they are all about books and reading in one way or another. There aren’t many contemporary short story collections for kids that don’t focus on “classic” stories. Although I love the great writers of the past (see Little Worlds below), some kids just aren’t ready to read past the antiquated language and into a world that doesn’t connect well with theirs. The situations and characters in Shelf Life are accessible and inspiring.
There aren’t a lot of great collections of classic stories for kids. I have to say, most of these stories require a high school reading level. I would also venture to say that most middle schoolers wouldn’t have the depth of understanding needed to really “get” these stories. For that reason, I always have to apologize about the book’s title to my teen readers, who may think that it’s a book for “little kids.” But of course, few of the stories in this collection were actually written for kids. They include many of the greatest short stories that have inspired writers for generations.
A mom on a homeschooling email list I take part in responded to a post of mine with a question. I thought it was a great question, and I wanted to share my answer. Her question:
I’m writing bc of your response to X the other day regarding wanting her kids to cover standards…
You said “the belief that kids have to “hit standards.” … is really completely untrue. If all you wanted was to make sure that your kids mastered K-6 standards, you could just wait until they were 12 and teach it all to them in a matter of months.”
I really would like to believe this, but I’m wondering where this idea comes from.
As with most homeschooling “wisdom,” I don’t have a source to cite about this. However, from what I’ve seen with my kids, kids I know, and kids I’ve heard of at conferences and through other parents, it does seem to be true. Aside
Two happy unschoolers we used to hang with.
from unaddressed learning disabilities, an intelligent, healthy, pre-teen child seems fully capable of learning most of the skills taught in elementary school quite quickly.
If you think about it, it makes sense:
Most of math taught in elementary school is stuff that kids who are living a rich lifestyle can derive for themselves when they’re ready. (In fact, this is how ancient mathematicians did it, right?)
My second child entered public school in 6th grade after very little math “instruction” (he did like to occasionally do math booklets but almost exclusively was interested in geometry). His teacher complimented me on “how well I taught him math”! Why? Well, their first homework was to learn how if you subtract a larger number from a smaller number, you get a negative number. This is something any kid who has been playing with math for fun can simply derive for herself (as my child did). Most of elementary math is only “hard” for kids because it’s being pushed on them when they’re not developmentally ready and without any fun attached.
Then there’s literacy skills:
Assuming your child learned to read (almost all kids will learn if they live in a household where books are loved and shared, whether or not they are taught), almost everything that is “taught” to kids in elementary school is something they would do anyway once they’re ready.
Children who grow up in reading households usually become readers themselves.
For example, my child’s English teacher made her students go through every single book they read and find “inferences” in each chapter. This was a pointless exercise for kids like mine. Any child who has read lots of stories and been read to and had lots of discussions about stories can do this. But most elementary school kids, unfortunately, are only hearing stories in school. And they seldom have an in-depth discussion with their families about much of anything. So the people who devise curriculum think that kids need to be “taught” this. Yet most homeschooled kids would just figure it out.
So what use are standards to homeschoolers?
There are two advantages that standards offer to homeschoolers who are living rich learning lifestyles, I believe. One is that you can sometimes use them if you suspect that your child might have a learning disability. But the problem is, since they don’t take into account natural variations in development, people often use them to over-diagnose learning disabilities.
The other advantage of standards is the actual content—I’ve used them to remind myself about topics that we might want to interest our kids in. So I think it’s valuable to look at standards and remember that kids should learn about ancient civilizations, for example, or electricity basics. But I found, to tell you the truth, that we went so far beyond what most standards call for in our areas of interest, and in our areas of non-interest, the kids don’t really retain much that they’re taught in elementary school anyway.
But truth be told, I’m not a pure unschooler:
I’m not a proponent of unschooling in any dogmatic way, but I think that parents’ understandings of their kids’ learning and intelligence has been poisoned, frankly, by the emphasis on hitting standards earlier and earlier.
Every bit of research of eminent adults has shown that many of them were considered “stupid” as kids. If you create one timeline of learning and expect everyone to achieve every point on it at the same age, you’re going to set a lot of kids up for failure.
It’s the educator’s job to set students up for success:
Pure unschooling – never offering guidance to children – doesn’t appeal to me, but child-led learning is what works for us.
I’d rather set kids up for success, and raise them to believe that they can fill in any gaps that are there when they are ready to. I’m watching my 17-year-old doing this with great success right now. I’m not saying that I wasn’t really scared that we’d put out uneducated kids at the end of this (I’m at that scary point with my 13-year-old right now), but watching the 17-year-old blossom and go for his passions has been wonderful.
Had I focused too much on standards and not on letting him follow his passions and develop his strengths, I believe that he may have become a “safer” student, but certainly not a more passionate, wide-ranging, and well-educated one. He’s apply to college this fall. I hope that the admissions committees see his achievements as I do: the success of rejecting the safety of standards for the joy of learning and following one’s passions.
Postscript 4 years later:
Kid #1 is a successful college senior. He continued his passion for learning and filing in the “holes” in his education is just a natural part of life for him. Kid #2 went back to public high school, was very successful there, and is now doing well as a freshman in college. In no way did it hurt them that they hardly ever met the “standards” head-on. When they find “gaps,” they fill them. But usually what they find is that our scattered approach prepared them for college better than focusing on standards ever could.
Rip the Page!
