Slice of Life 2024: 24 of 31- The perfect cupcake and the snake

 

 It's March, and March is for slicing.  Anyone is welcome to join us through Two Writing Teachers, slicing, sharing, and commenting on other slices! 

  

  

Yesterday's post is the prequel to my work with M. 

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Over the next fifteen minutes, M. proved to be one of the most complicated writers I've worked with. Those duck feet I mentioned in my first post? They were working double-time. 

I set up three pages for her, reaching into my bag of tricks for paper with only about 8 lines per page.

 Beginning: Polly makes cupcakes and there's too much frosting.

Middle:  Too little frosting

End: Just the right amount

We talked through the story a number of times, me trying to keep it simple, M. trying to complicate the plot but then forgetting what she'd thought of, planned, and said. Finally, she had a fairly clear sense of beginning, middle, and end. I handed her a pen I love, pointed to the top left corner of the first line, and suggested she start. She found the word "one" on a classroom chart, and she worked to copy it, line and curve, by line and curve. Not really letter by letter. She wrote "day" on her own, making the "a" in a way I've not seen before. 

"How do I spell Polly?" M. wanted to know. 

I went through the strategies I have to get kids to write the sounds they hear. M. got all four sounds, but fell apart when her e at the end (not a y, and that was ok with me for the time being) was going the wrong direction. At least with a little reassurance, M. could pull herself together almost as quickly as she could fall apart. 

My next realization was that, while M. had a fair amount of phonemic awareness, she had almost zero concept of spacing. Therefore, even when her letters matched the words she was trying to write, deciphering her message was an enormous challenge because spaces between words were non-existent. Furthermore, she did a lot of forgetting where she was so the writing sample contained many repeated words, adding to the challenge of understanding her overall message. She was a complete and thorough case study of all the cognitive work that written expression involves. 

We went back and forth, and she wrote more and more. When she wanted to involve a snake in the story, I went along with it, and in the final scene, Polly and the snake enjoyed perfect cupcakes together. I have no idea where the snake fit in, but the kid was writing, and she was approximating a little more spacing between her words. 

To honor the work she put in in order to get her ideas onto the page, I did something I almost never do, co-writing with her. I wrote a sentence, and then I passed it to her. We went back and forth until the story was (relatively) complete. 

And then, both in the spirit of my own curiosity and in order to motivate her, I pulled out my computer and an AI tool I've been piloting. 

***Leah Koch gets the credit for this idea, as she shared it when Sarah Valter, she, and I presented about AI in Colorado. We wrote about some of the ways we've been using AI for writing instruction in a mini-series. *****

M. and I hadn't written much, so it took me only a minute or two to type her piece into the "Paste Text" box, and then 

We waited as the system concocted the story, and I was super worried about what the snake was going to look like, but the end product was almost as good as the third cupcake-- you can check it out here, if you're curious... 

One of the things about M. that I am learning is that she has very childish reactions and also very adultish reactions. She actually did start crying while she watched her story with self-proclaimed tears of joy. 

The best part was that when I walked in the next day, M. had another story about Polly ready to work on, and she told ME that she was going to be working hard on her spacing. 

Please know that there is a LOT of work and worry that remains, but this was a fun piece in the story to be part of.