Here is a “lost” blog post that I wrote after taking part in a full day Tim Rylands workshop (last month in Kent, UK)

An outline of the workshop is available on Tim’s site, here, and the combined thoughts and reactions of the day can also be found, here, written by Gail and myself.

The day really sparked my thinking – especially in regards to the framework I am piecing together ­- using computer games creatively to enhance and encourage student writing.

Two ideas that I keep coming back to are giving students

1.    permission to wonder

and

2.    permission to play.

 

Permission to wonder, to  share your thinking, to brainstorm, to develop creative ideas, silly ideas, the freedom to pose possibilities and run with them.

Too often this step is non-existent in the writing we do in our classrooms, in our haste to get to the written text, the conventions and the punctuation we dismiss this gathering and sorting of ideas – thus depriving our students of a wealth of interesting and exciting possibilities that they can choose to use in their writing.

Giving students the permission to play also supports student language acquisition by making the collection of ideas, words, phrases and sentences

·      physical,

·      active,

·      kineastheic,

·      REAL.

This activity and movement, I‘ve noticed, is vital in my school and class setting, so I was interested to see Tim employing techniques and strategies that got the students moving.

The students gained much from physically linking movement with words – I wonder if this could be connected to “muscle memory” that dancers use????

Thanks Tim for a fantastic day – you are still sparking my thinking and learning – even from this distance. Amazing 🙂