Creativity Starts Outside The Box Article Review Example

Brief Summary

Stephany Held in her journal article entitled “Dumping Graphic Organizers for a More Effective Approach to Prewriting Instruction” featured her experience in teaching writing. She mentioned that trying other approach in teaching can be risky but the risk is worth it if the students start to write creatively. Held shared that in her experience, putting the students inside the box will result to formulaic stories without any hint of creativity. The box mentioned is teaching the students to fill in the graphic organizers before they start to write the story. The boxes that they are going to fill in are beginning, middle and end of the story that they are going to write. In the end, the students passed stories without any thread from the beginning to the end. The stories were just repetitions of the prewriting. Held then went outside the box and employed an approach that triggered the students’ creativity. The new approach consists of reading aloud, sharing insights with other students, group writing, and writing in pairs among others. The exercises pushed them to think outside the boxes of “beginning,” “middle,” and “end.” As a result, the students submitted more creative and coherent stories.

“How”

As a kindergarten teacher, the article is a big help in my goal to teach my students to write their own simple stories. Thinking outside the box, I believe that I will be able to bring out the creative juices of the children. I will make a one-week lesson plan for writing. I will make sure that the pre-writing will be very short in order not to duplicate the experience of Held in her first experience as a teacher of prewriting.
First exercise will be done by pair. I will give the students the freedom to choose a classmate that they are comfortable with. After the pairing, they are asked to read the selected interesting story aloud. After reading aloud, the kids will ask their pair the things they have learned from the story. Going back to the plenary, we will again read the story and together identify the beginning, the middle, and the end. The activity will not end with the identification but a reflection from each of the students regarding the parts of a story.
The next session, I will ask volunteers from the class to recall the last lessons regarding writing. After which, I will group them by three and instruct them to write a creative beginning of any of their favourite animals. After writing, I will visit every group to assist ensuring that I will not put them inside the box of the structured story. During the last day of the week, they will be asked to work independently on their own stories. Using the principles from the journal article namely “Reading Aloud and Thinking Aloud using Mentor Texts,” “Using Peer Talk,” and “Conferencing with Students” will surely bring out the kids’ creativity.