A Website of Children’s Writing

Last fall, eleven sections of our language arts classes collaborated to celebrate “Writing Our Communities”—spending a Saturday in an east Austin school to learning about the neighborhoods from which children come and the resources they draw upon when they write and learn. These new teachers explored and community resources that serve children’s writing—through discussion, a panel of community leaders, a community walk, time for their own writing, and time for listening to and working beside teachers of writing. Each of our students returned to his/her own “placement” school to take up helping children write from their life stories—and then helping them bring those stories to a final, polished form. Along the way, we secured many parents’ permissions to photograph the children’s stories both across Austin and its adjacent districts. Back on campus, we put together a technology proposal to develop a website that would allow segments of these children’s stories to be grouped and downloaded readily to teach not only other child writers, but our new teachers as well. All writers learn from other writers, but this collection of child writing, arrayed and coded for its offerings, will help teachers help young writers to draw on the strengths of kids just like them. Already accustomed to “writing like Eric Carle” or “like Mo Willems,” now young writers can also work like second-grader Stevie who chose speech balloons to make conversation, or like 10-year-old Lupe, who chose to write in two languages when she introduced dialogue. The website will allow instructors to upload other pieces of ‘permissioned’ writing, and readily locate just what we want to demonstrate when we teach teachers to examine children’s efforts with a discerning and appreciative stance.