If Prewriting Doesn't Lead to a Better Draft...

I was working with a group of students to apply the lessons I had learned from Victoria about how we need to avoid listing and clustering ideas that lead to shallow development. One of the things she said really struck me: "If our prewriting doesn't lead to a better draft, then we are wasting our time."

We started with a lesson I learned from Jennifer Wilkerson, where kids create anchor drafts and then shift them to match the prompts and genre charges. The link to the lesson is here. 

What I realized is that the prewriting should help establish links between the ideas and begin to help the writer shape the text structure/format. One of the things I'm thinking about a lot is that we ask kids to put ideas in these graphic organizers that have text structure formulas that just don't fit. You can't organize ideas in a graphic organizer if you don't have any ideas yet. You don't know what structures will fit your ideas until you understand and think about how your ideas are related or connected. You don't know what structure your ideas will need until you understand your purpose. Let me say it again: You can't organize nothing.

For this essay, I took some prewriting I had already done and shifted it to the STAAR prompt about a time you faced a challenge. I looked at the ideas on my chart and found the connection. The dumpster examples was the perfect fit for the purpose: a challenge.

After thinking about it, I realized that the ideas that connected for this purpose we a natural fit for a problem/solution type essay structure. That structure linked the ideas in a way that would solve the problem we see in a lot of student writing where they just list the ideas that they have brainstormed. 

Here's the essay that I modeled for kids: 

Dumpster diving is an embarrassing hobby, but it has become an important and entertaining hobby in my life. Somebody once asked me why in the world would I dig in the trash. 

It began during a difficult time in my life. I was starting over after a divorce. The house was empty except for my son's bedroom stuff and a rocking chair from his nursery. There wasn't much money to buy new stuff. But, there was still no place to sit and no place to eat. I needed a cheap and quick solution. 

I noticed that the neighbors were moving out of the rent house and left tons of junk by the dumpster. There was a broken coffee table from 1980 something. Ugly. But it had a nice shape. The legs were broken, but I could use the top. I dragged it into the back yard, jumped in my son's 1989 Dodge Ram truck and headed down other neighborhood alleys - hoping no one would see me. 

It wasn't too long until I found a rolling table with no top. A few blocks later, I found the side of an old dresser with the most beautiful blue finish. At home, I screwed the pieces together and added trim from the frame of a broken mirror. Now I had a kitchen table. I painted a checkerboard on the top, thinking of the games my son and I could play after dinner. The discarded trash turned into a useful, creative centerpiece in the kitchen. One room down...more dumpsters to visit!