Friday Free Write

Every Friday, we have been doing a free write, with varying degrees of success. I ask the kids to write what they want or in response to a prompt for 8 minutes. After 8 minutes, I ask if they want to share. If they do, I listen and compliment anything I liked. If they don't, I fold it up and put it into an envelope. After 8 weeks, I will open up their envelope, ask them to reread their work and choose a piece to revise. Hopefully they will have something worth revising out of those 8 pieces. (Last week, Marko was delighted with his work of copying the word "the" over and over again for 8 minutes, so this is requiring a little bit of faith from me.) I got this process from Julie at Brave Writer, who also advises parents to do activities along with their children. It's a good way to gauge how appropriate (or difficult or ridiculous or scary or tedious or boring) the task may be, and also follows that whole children learn what they live approach. If you don't want your children to swear, don't swear. Ahem.

In the spirit of doing what I'm asking my children to do, I'm sharing this poem that I wrote during free write time (and then revised) and I will tell you it is taking an unexpected amount of courage to hit Publish. But doing this exercise myself is really helping me to anticipate and plan for reasons that my kids might have trouble with writing and editing. This was the only thing I wrote in weeks and weeks that I felt even had the potential to be shared. This is reminding me that a lot of what my kids pull out of their envelopes will be trash and that's fine and hopefully there's something in there they are excited to fix up and expand upon.



Sit With It

Sit with uncertainty, sit with your sadness.
Sit with your neighbor while she tells you all of the messy details you didn't want to know.
Sit with your bread while it crackles, just out of the oven.
Sit, especially on the Sabbath, while the laundry taunts you.
Sit with your daughter while she painstakingly pens her letter.
It's not how you would do it, but sit with that idea and wait for it to pass,
And compliment her cursive, and smile at her.

Sit under a a tree, on a cold mossy boulder, a park bench with a dusting of snow.
Sit with your coffee while it's hot, instead of migrating it from room to room and in and out of the microwave a half dozen times before noon.
Sit with your son, while he sobs in your lap, for reasons you can't untangle.
You don't need to fix it right now, or maybe the sitting will do the work.

Sit for one extra minute at the end of dinner, to see who else lingers,
Who has a last thought they need to say out loud, now that bellies are full.
Let the sitting be enough, as it is. It may fix something, but then, it may not.
Either way, you can still enjoy the feeling of your ankles curled around each other against the chair leg,
And the assuasive liberation of not doing a thing.