This is a popular post that I am reposting due to requests. Have you ever thought of using Playdough to help you reimagine a writing project? Sometimes when you’re stuck, trying a different creative pathway opens new insights. Let me know if you try it and have fun!
What do you think of when you hear the word revision? For most writers, revision signals that you’ve already completed at least one draft of a piece of writing and now it’s for pruning and polishing the work to get it ready for publication. To many of my college students, it seems to mean a painful process that the teacher recommends to get a better grade. And to the fourth graders I worked with in a poetry residency, it seems to mean recopying a piece of writing and fixing spelling errors. But as I’ve grown in my writing skills over the years, revision has come to mean something very different to me. Revision means I’ve already done the hard work of thinking up an idea and committing it to paper. Getting the first draft is much more likely to scare me then revising what I’ve already written. But I’m a seasoned writer with lots of revision experience tucked into my writer’s backpack. How could I teach this skill to fourth graders?
I knew my best bet for finding teaching resources was to do a web search, and I found a wonderful, hands-on activity on the blog Teaching Authors: Six Teaching Authors Who Also Teach Writing. As I read through the post entitled “Revision! A LINGO Poem! Poetry Friday! and a Play Dough Exercise!” by April Halprin Wayland , I knew I’d found my lesson. But even April’s well-structured lesson needed a bit of revision for the group that I had in mind. Here’s a description of the lesson I did at Swansfield Elementary in Columbia, Maryland, as part of a five week poetry residency in the fourth grade sponsored by the PTA and funded through a grant from the Howard County Arts Council. While I thought the playdough activity would be fabulous, I realized that the teachers might need a heads-up, so I sent an email the day before telling them what to expect.
When I walked into the room carrying a plastic tub of small Play-Doh cans, the kids were immediately excited. After I assured everyone that they would indeed get to make something with the playdough, I wrote the word “Revision” on the board. Then I broke it down into the prefix “re” and the root “vision” to explain that revision is the act of seeing a piece of writing in a new way and making it better. The students were used to seeing me wear my purple poetry glasses—to help me see the world with different eyes—so it was not a big leap for them to imagine seeing a piece of writing in a new light. We had constantly revised as we worked on our group poems—changing words, selecting phrases, and deciding what to keep and what to set aside. But what did playdough have to do with writing poetry? Let me recap the lesson and you’ll find out.
Here’s what you need:
- construction paper for a smooth and clean work surface
- one can of Play-Doh for each child
- a writing sample to revise as a demonstration
- drafts of student work to revise
- Each child places a piece of construction paper on the desk to provide a work surface and to keep the desk clean.
- Classroom helpers pass out the cans of playdough. It’s nice if you have enough cans for each child to select two colors, but the students seemed very happy having one can to work with.
- Direct the students to make a sculpture of anything they want. Most students made animals, food, or people.
- Tell the children that since they are creating a piece of art, it needs to have a title and when they finish the sculpture, they write the title on the artist’s mat. I allowed about 12-15 minutes for this portion of the activity. Most students seemed to need this much time.
- Next, the students take a gallery walk around the classroom to observe everyone’s sculptures. They consider the question, “What inspires me?” as a way to cue themselves to think about revision. I allowed about 5-6 minutes for this portion of the lesson.
- Once they complete the gallery walk and sit down, students are directed to make one change to their sculpture, any change that they can imagine (except to squish up the work and begin again). Then there are to make a note about what they changed.
- Select several students to present their sculptures to the whole class using the title of the work and then describing the one change they made.
- Demonstrate your revision process on a poem that the class drafted together; discuss why you chose to make certain changes.
- Allow the students to revise a draft from a previous lesson.
The room buzzed with possibility and excitement as the children tore open the jars of playdough and began squishing it around. The process was the same in every class—some students got to work immediately and had a definite result in mind while others just held the playdough and said they didn’t know what to do. I advised them to “Just roll, pinch, and squeeze it until an idea comes to you. Let the dough guide your imagination.” Within a few minutes, everyone was completely absorbed in the activity and quietly lost in the world of possibility. The gallery walk provided a space for the students to admire everyone’s work before revising their own and sharing with each other. Due to the time constraints imposed by a 45 minute session, I had to limit the sharing and moved on to demonstrating the writing component of the playdough-poetry connection.
For my revision process, I selected the previous week’s class-poem on telling a fairy tale in a different voice. The students had co-written a poem based on the story of Aladdin and told the tale in the voice of the genie. During that lesson, we had worked on the poetic devise of repetition, including sounds, words, and phrases. Additionally, many students wrote their draft poems in a paragraph format, so I showed them how to make the poem look pretty on the page–an idea that my friend Grace Cavalieri shared with me—a much simpler concept than explaining formal linebreaks and very visual—which connected nicely to the playdough session.
While I had to move on to the next class before the students completed their revisions, I felt that the goal of the lesson had been achieved-to show that revision is something all artists do and that it provides an opportunity to make changes to something that is already good. Happy revising! And if you get stuck for some inspiration, you can always count on playdough.
Resource: See the April Halprin Wayland’s version of the lesson here:
“Revision! A LINGO Poem! Poetry Friday! and a Play Dough Exercise!”
on the blog Teaching Authors: Six Teaching Authors Who Also Teach Writing.
The blog originally ran on September 9, 2011.
Play-Doh image courtesy of: http://d3gqasl9vmjfd8.cloudfront.net/56b8aa77-0b48-4971-a222-dfddb7266154.png
