Penny Kittle

I'm reading Write Beside Them, by Penny Kittle.  Trying to read.  I'm a little distracted by 13 year old girl drama and sadness.

"Grammar is a piano I play by ear.  All I know about grammar is its power."  --Joan Didion

I was reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem in Los Angeles thirteen years ago; I remember.  Something big hit me while I was reading that book -- life-changing big.

The skinny Polish clothes designer/manufacturer who lived next to me in L.A. has morphed with the skinny Polish chambermaid dying of cancer (with three kids) I knew when I was a teenager in Maine.
In my mind, they are the same person now.

The boy who rode his bicycle to Burger King after school has blended with the guy who lives under a truck cap in the woods.  One is alive, one is dead.  The boy on the bike ended up in the quarry.  The one under the truck cap still summers under the truck cap, I think.

Penny Kittle puts out Interest Journals for her class.  She has a great pile of journals with labels written on the covers: Driving, Sports, Parents, Friendship, Movies, Video Games, Cartoons, Snow, Hair, Sexual Harassment, Alcoholism, Death, Funny Stories, Jokes, Ghost Stories, Candy, Snowmen.  She had to cover over the labels for Love and Marriage because nobody wrote in those journals.
Students read/skim what has come before in the Journal and then add to it.
It's one of the Quick Write options.

Some of the other quick writes are:

* The music in your heart           (I tried this one at school and it was a hit.)  Students make a big heart on a sheet of paper and write songs that are special to them/ their favorites toward the middle of the heart and the songs they dislike out at the edges.  Pick a song and tell its story/ your story.
One student I have is working on writing the story for every single song she chose.  And she is making a digital story to go with it.
* Poetry        Read a poem at the start of class and have students respond to a line in the poem.  No one is required to write poetry in her class.  She uses a lot of Billy Collins, William Stafford, Langston Hughes, Donald Hall and Gary Soto.
* Model Text
Read model text aloud and then quick write.  Sandra Cisneros or Billy Collins.  She might use three model texts and three quick writes, or only write on one.  Mix it up.
* Reading blogs  Every three weeks or so they use quick write time for reading blogs.  These aren't book reports but book talk, the way you would chat with a friend or recommend a title.  They write, pass the notebook, read, write, pass again.
*Show vs. Tell
*Compressing Time  In this section P.K. recommends True Stories: Guides for Writing from Your Life, by Rebecca Rule and Susan Wheeler.  I got the book, because she recommended it so highly.  All I can say so far is that it has one of the worst book covers I've ever seen.
* A Place in Time
* A Moment from Elementary School
*Argue Writes  Each day she brings in an article from the newspaper that provokes a response.  This happens during the editorial writing and argument section of the course.

I wish my 13 year old would come out of her room; we could make up some Interest Journal topics and laugh.  And then maybe we could write.