Inspiration For Reluctant Writers!

Every single one of my third graders was talking. All at the same time. Seriously. I don’t think anyone was listening to anybody. But not one of them cared. They had a story to tell and they were going to tell it, by golly.

Here’s why!

We recently had the author Rachelle Burk visit our school. In preparation for her visit I had purchased a few of her books to read to my class. In the past our librarian would have also supported our efforts to prepare our students for an author’s visit but since our library was no longer and our wonderful librarian was now a second grade teacher the task fell completely on classroom teachers. This part of the saga is a shame but that’s politics for you!

Anyway, being the bibliophile that I am, I purchased the books and began reading them to my class. One afternoon I picked up one of Ms. Burk’s short chapter books, The Tooth Fairy Trap, to read. The PTO had sponsored a contest to design a tooth fairy trap so I figured it was about time we heard the story from whence the contest came. It’s an adorable story about the Tooth Fairy, well, actually ‘a’ tooth fairy. It seems in the story there is more than one and they get assigned a list of children. Bluma, the hero Tooth Fairy of our story, is allergic to her own fairy dust and has the bad habit of getting distracted by a variety of things while on the job involving the children on her list. You see, she visits them often since, of course, children lose more than one tooth.

So it was during the reading of this book that I found my class, as I said, all talking. Now, don’t get me wrong, it is not that unusual for my class to be all talking and nobody listening! It’s just that they weren’t just talking, they were telling stories! Even Joshua, my most reluctant writer, was telling the story of how he lost a tooth.

“I was brushing my teeth and something was in my mouth so I spit it out. It was my tooth but it went down the drain! So I told my dad and he took the pipe off under the sink and found my tooth.”

“Joshua, that is so cool! And of course, you are lucky enough to have a dad that actually knows how to take a pipe off from under a sink!” I said.

“Yup,” Joshua replied with a big grin, “He is fixing our whole house, he knows how to take pipes off.”

I sat back and marveled and listened for a while and then I finally interjected;

“Boys and girls, you are all telling stories! Really good stories! Stories you care deeply about.”

They all smiled and nodded like, ‘Well, duh, we know!’

“But, back when we were writing our small moment narratives, not one of you wrote a, ‘The Day I Lost My Tooth” story! As a matter of fact, some of you even tried to tell me that you didn’t have any stories to write about!” I gave a little look and grin in Joshua’s direction. He grinned back, remembering all the times he told me he didn’t have any stories to write.

They all sat there thinking about what I had just said. And then they all started talking at the same time again, lol! But I had an idea!

So we wrote those, “The Day I Lost My Tooth” stories. We wrote them for Rachelle Burk. We wrote them so she would know how her book inspired writers.

And I put “The Tooth Fairy Trap” in my beginning of the year book bin. Next year I plan on using it to inspire those small moment narratives, even amongst my most reluctant readers! Because everybody loses a tooth!