Digging Potatoes
Archives, September - October 1999

"Writers write for the same reason readers read, to find out what’s gonna happen."
                       -Elmore Leonard

Writing is not dictation from hand to paper. Miraculous things can happen when we write. Questions rise up like ripe potatoes in a farmers spade; Writing is the process of digging. Irish Poet Seamus Heany says in his poem Digging.

This month’s lessons help students to locate a subject or an angle that makes them want to write more and helps organize their thoughts.

K-2 Feeling Trees (a mapping activity)

 Feelings come and feelings go but they attach themselves to people, events and things. A feeling tree helps young writers to see the connection between emotion and memory.

1. Begin by drawing the outline of your hand and arm on a large rectangular piece of paper. Leave plenty of room above your fingers
   
2. In the middle of your hand write a feeling. Begin by listing feelings on the board with the class. Let the list grow long.
   
3. For each finger draw or write about a time, or a person or a thing that makes you feel this emotion.
   
4. Share your feeling trees with the class.
   
5. Pick a branch off your feeling tree and write about it on a separate piece of paper.

3-8 The Story Circle (from Writing a Road to Self Discovery. Click here for more information or to purchase)

Ever notice how ears are shaped like question marks? That’s because when we really listen, we hear questions.

                                                                   Barry Lane

1.  Sit in a circle with your class and tell stories, real stories from your life. Pass a talking stick and make it a rule that only the person with the stick is allowed to talk. The other students in the group get to ask curious questions after the story is told. The students can write their questions on scraps of paper or they say them out loud and the teacher can write them on a piece of paper. Curious questions are not fix it questions which try to correct the story but simply wondering

2.  Read your questions and listen for the ones which intrigue you. 

3.  Try turning a question into a new lead for the story.

                                     Example: What did the robber look like?

                                      Lead: I don’t remember what the robber looked like.

4.  Share leads with each other. Talk about how questions can help a writer find an angle or focus on a story.

Note: An activity like this won’t help find a lead for all students but it can help a class to see the value of curious questions, and help create a listening classroom. Brenda Ueland says, when we are listened to ideas unfold and expand inside us. Teach students to ask questions

9-12 Question Gallery (from After THE END (click here for more information or to purchase) and the Curious Researcher by Bruce Ballenger)

The Questions are the soul; the facts are the body.

                                                                            Barry Lane

1.   Questions can help us find potatoes in factual writing. Next time you assign a research paper have your students get in groups and ask curious questions about their individual subjects. Curious questions are simply questions you want to know more about.

Example: Subject Ants

What do ants eat?

When do they sleep?

How do they mate?

2.  Pick 5 questions that you want to know more about and put them at the top of a blank piece of paper.

3.  Hang up the papers on the walls around the room.

4.  Students go around the room and check off the question which intrigues them the most, and they write another question at the bottom of the page.

5.   When you get your paper back read all the questions and pick several of the most intriguing and head for the library.