Imagination

Yesterday I worked with my student (feels funny to say that about a child I tutor as opposed to a child in my classroom--I wonder why) on writing. She had an assignment from school to write about the First Thanksgiving from the perspective of a Pilgrim girl. The teacher provided a lot of information about the feast and then she had to put it together in a first person account.
J (my student) and I started talking about this assignment when I saw her last Friday. I told her to stretch her imagination and try to see the scene in her head and then tell me what she saw. We got some books from the library to help put some historically accurate images in her mind's eye. And then today I had her make a web with notes of what she saw, ate, did, felt, so that she would have that information all ready for the writing.
I taught her a fun trick I learned from a storyteller. She has the kids place their thumbs in the middle of their palm and then wrap their fingers around their thumbs very tight. Then she tells them to close there eyes and wait for the hand motion to activate their imagination. If they wait long enough, they will be able to see the colors and shapes with their eyes closed. (I love the gesture that makes this activity so concrete. I think it's genius. And it keeps little hands still.)
So I did this with J as part of the brainstorming, and then I set her loose to write her assignment. It was wonderful to see her dive into writing. She loved writing up those 12 sentences. She delighted in little details that she thought to add--for example that she didn't like the onions because they made her cry. And she wanted to keep working on the assignment even after she'd finished the part she was required to do for homework.
It was such a joy to watch her open up to writing. (In the middle of writing her paragraph, she stopped and said, "I need to do the imagination trick again.") It was wonderful that it wasn't just a matter of counting out the required ten sentences or looking back to the teacher's paper to answer the questions in the assignment. J really could picture the scene and her excitement flowed from using writing as a way to capture something in her mind's eye.
That's why I love teaching writing to kids. The victories are small, but so clear and visible to the adult eye.

And here are the flowers that the family gave me for my birthday. A really wonderful birthday!