Students jump quickly at the opportunity to relate their emotions to their writing process. The hard part, then, for an educator is to make the classroom and the school as interesting as the students’ emotional environments. Educators need to be active, out-spoken and structured about what will happen in the classroom. Students have to be actively engaged in writing that is relevant to their own experiences.
Primary grade students begin to go through the process of several different writing experiences during their school career. Drawing and scribbling, for example, lead into short writing and maybe one finished processed piece of work. The development of writing in the primary grades motivated me as a third grade teacher to do the research on writing and social development.
A teacher needs to think out an approach to values carefully, concentrating on those connected to the controversial issues of students in today’s society. The writing process has to do with the thinking process. If teachers assume that the students possess basic skills of logic and thinking, when in truth they are lacking in them, then we as educators set the students up for failure before they can ever begin a writing assignment. This unit will help teachers tap into the students’ thinking. It will help me develop the students’ inner voice, which, in turn will allow the students to become better writers and practice useful anger management skills.
Looking at my students’ experiences with writing was difficult, because the programs that we have been following to teach writing have advised us to prompt many of the students writing experiences. You find a key in your desk. It starts to pull you down the hallway. Where does this key lead you? You are walking through the forest. You come upon a fairy. This fairy grants you three wishes. What are your three wishes? Explain your adventure. These are just some of the forty-five minute writing prompts that a third grader may attempt during a typical writing assessment. Would you be able to write about a forest if you have never been in one? A fairy: what is that? The students’ daily life was never written about. The students’ feelings, thoughts or emotions were never really tapped into at all. That is why I felt I should try to integrate social development and the craft of writing, which will help the students hear their inner voice. I needed writing activities that will help improve my students’ anger management skills in the classroom. This unit can easily be adopted in the curriculum used in k-3 grades across the New Haven Public School System Project Charlie.
Project Charlie is a prevention program set up to help teachers’ help their students deal with drug, alcohol and anger management. This program is fine but how am I going to fit this in to my daily instruction?This unit will incorporate anger management skills (understanding the inner voice) and writing during a series of forty-minute writing lessons.
Writing, as well as social development, needs to begin at an early stage of a child’s schooling. If improper social development skills are not in place, many problems can occur. The biggest of, the problems high school drop out. This unit will empower practices in teachers’ that will enable students to stay in school.
The unit “The Inner Voice: Writing as a Tool to Control Anger in the Classroom”
consists of a nine step-writing organizer with a focus on managing anger. Students will evaluate their own work with checklists. Assessment consists of teacher formal and informal checkpoints. They will take place daily. The students will write about their thoughts and daily feelings to help them reflect and to pull feeling words (new vocabulary) from for their writing. It is towards these ends that I present the following unit objectives.
