Ode to Sticky Notes

This week I read Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox to my class.  My first experience with this book was in Summer Institute with NWP this year, and I've been excited to share it with my students.
After reading the book, we talked about the different kinds of memories that Wilfrid shared with Miss Nancy and brainstormed our own similar memories.  We've been working on writing a paragraph about each memory and on Friday we'll each bring in our own memory basket to share with the class.

I had no idea what a profound effect this experience would have on my kids!  Although I focused on sharing my warm memory and my memory that is more precious than gold, my kids wanted to share their memories that make them cry.  And they did.  Cry, that is.  I felt a little like a group therapist.  The impressive thing about it was how supportive they were of each other.  They shared connections they had to each others memories, offered encouragement, and generally showed real compassion.  It was an incredibly powerful moment.

Today, a couple of my boys were struggling to come up with memories.  One said woefully, "I have no memories."  I whipped out my handy dandy sticky note pad.  I handed a stack of stickies to the more self-reliant boy and told him to just start thinking of big events in his life and putting one on each sticky note.  "Don't worry about what memory category from the story it fits in," I said, "just make as many as you can."  He immediately set to work.

If you haven't guessed by now, the other boy was Burt.  For him, I put the stack of sticky notes in front of me, grabbed a pencil, and started brainstorming with him.  Another boy was sitting nearby and offered to help.  He started rattling off fun things he had done, and memories he had already written down, and got Burt thinking.  As Burt talked, I wrote down what he said and slapped sticky notes into his journal.  In about 10 minutes, he had two pages full of notes.

"All right," I said, "now it's time to choose something you'd like to write about."

His eyes widened.  He pushed his glasses onto his forehead and pushed his hands into his eyes.

"I really don't know what to write about."

A quote from our reading in The Little Prince floated through my mind: It is such a secret place, the land of tears.

"Okay.  Let's look at the ones you had a lot to say about."

We narrowed it down to two choices.  A time someone stole his stuff at the beach, and the time he rode a roller coaster.  He decided on the beach.  But again, he just stared at the sticky note and at me, and repeated, "I really don't know what to write about."

I showed him how much he had already shared with me, and recounted the details he had told me earlier.

More staring.

I grabbed more sticky notes and put them in front of him.

"Okay Burt.  No writing for now.  I want you to close your eyes for a minute and run this story through your mind like a movie.  Then you're going to draw each scene on a sticky.  We'll add words later."

Like magic, he set to work.  10 minutes later, he had several stick figure drawings of his day on the beach.  By then, it was time to put our journals away.  The sad look was gone, and tomorrow we'll add words to his drawings.  From there, we'll move to paper and add detail.

Baby steps.  We'll get there in baby steps.  Writing is a nearly undefinable process.  What works for one person is completely foreign to another.  But I believe we all have a process that works.  We all have a writer within.  We just have to find it.

I hope I can help Burt find his.