Sacred Writing Time

This year I have been starting off every class with Sacred Writing Time- 10 minutes for the students to write in their notebooks about anything they choose.

• We began by talking about exercise and practice and how this helps us to develop our skills in certain areas- we know this is true of writing as well.
• We went over the guidelines for this time: 

1. This is a time to write, not doodle or stare into space- we need to have an idea and a plan before coming to class (for those who are stuck for a topic, a visual or prompt is provided every day).
2. We need to vary our writing. To do this, we make short-term goals and evaluate then frequently and set new goals. We want to grow as writers so we need to take risks and try new strategies in our writing.
3. We are engaged in our writing, therefore, we do not talk to others. This is precious, sacred time so we use it wisely.
4. We will share at the end of the 10 minutes, either with a partner, table group, or whole group. We will be putting examples on our blogs and sharing them with our parents in future.

All About SWT- Sacred Writing Time in grade 6:

We write for 10 minutes at the beginning of each class:
Our rationale/why we do this:

Sacred Writing Time builds writing fluency skills. Producing a page of interesting thoughts in 10 minutes is a goal.

Sacred Writing Time challenges us to be creative. We learn to present our ideas in unique formats.

Sacred Writing Time is when we practice new writing skills from our mini-lessons.

Students reflected on this special part of our class. Here are some of their observations:

Sacred Writing Time is….	interesting fun free writing creative a little difficult challenging exciting quiet time to think and write awesome my favourite time too short! self-reflection amazing time to write my memories
Sacred Writing will help us….	to brainstorm ideas for other writing projects. remember special events this year. to improve our writing skills. to build our vocabulary to try out new ways of writing without worrying. to tell our stories. to compare our writing from the beginning of the year to the end. focus on different writing skills when we set goals for ourselves.

Here are a few example pages from students as well as some reflections they wrote (on their blogs) about this activity:

From a student learning English:

・I have written 7 different stories in Sacred Writing Time.
・I have improved my writing during Sacred Writing Time in these three ways:

・Think and write
・How can I grab readers pay attention
・ Strategy (Start→middle→end)

・One way I can improve my writing skills during Sacred Writing Time is:
Write more faster, and early decision to what will i write about. And always challenge harder, use difficult word and challenge to yourself.

From another student:

I have written 11 different stories in Sacred Writing Time.

I have improved my writing during Sacred Writing Time in these three ways: showing emotions, spelling and connecting the sentences smoothly.

One way I can improve my writing skills during Sacred Writing Time is to increase the amount of writing and to use alliteration or onomatopoeia to make my writing even more vivid.
Student Page Samples:

Neighbourhood Maps for Out of Eden Learn Project

Recently, our students have been participating in the Out of Eden Learn Project. Here is a blurb about it from their website:


Out of Eden Learn is a unique online learning community designed to accompany Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk. Through Out of Eden Learn, students from around the world can engage in Paul’s journey and all that it represents. They explore their own neighbourhoods, investigate contemporary global issues, and reflect on how they as individuals fit into a broader geographical and historical context. In addition, they share their perspectives and interact with one another on an exciting digital platform that uses social media as a springboard for deep, meaningful learning. The goal is to ignite students’ interest in the wider world and support them to become more informed, thoughtful, and engaged “global citizens.”


Out of Eden Learn is an initiative of Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in collaboration with Paul Salopek.


As part of the project our students will complete six footsteps. We have completed the second one in which students took a walk around their neighbourhood and drew a map of what they had observed. A sampling of these can be seen below. They also interviewed their parents or neighbours and wrote stories to accompany the maps. By engaging in the slow journalism that Paul has modelled, they are able to make observations and, hopefully, connections to their environment. I have included a few of the stories as well.


Example #1: Luis

Kite Flying

One afternoon, there was a strong wind so we decided to go to the beach and fly my kite. We went outside with our bikes and slowly drove to the beach. the ride took about two minutes and we passed many plots that were empty or under construction. As we neared the sea, the breeze increased and became a strong wind, coming from the sea and going into the land. As we unpacked the kite, it already strained and fought to be free. After some preparation, we granted this wish by letting it fly free and the spool spinning out. High, higher, higher the kite flew. Higher than ever before! The wind tugged, pulled and played with the black triangle. The spool was out, so the kite flew at around 100 meters above the sea! There the wind held the wonderful kite, flying it stable. All other times that we had flown it, it always bucked up and down like a wild pony but here it flew very calm. Sadly, we had to reel it in after some time as we wanted to go home. The black shape slowly descended. This took forever but finally it fell down to the ground. Following this, we carefully packed the beauty onto our cycles and swiftly cycled back home. At home, my mother waited for us with a nice dinner and I spent the rest of the afternoon playing with our rabbits and ducks. I hope we do this again and often as it was a lot of fun.

I have lived in this house since summer 2013. I came from Malaysia and now I am living in India for three years. My house is painted white and has a huge garden. In this garden, we have one area of grass where we play soccer. We also have two ducks that walk around freely, two rabbits in an enclosure, two love birds in a cage and 14 fish swimming in an enclosure to separate them from the ducks. I love my house as it has a big garden and a wonderful pool. Also, it only takes two minutes to go to the sea side and the beach is wonderful. My neighbourhood is very calm and I enjoy every minute of being there.


Example #2: Luca

• I have lived here since 2012
• We have a great guard dog outside the gate named Domy.
• I live in Injambakkam.
• I live next to Hot Kitchen
• They plan to pave our road
• They plan to instal solar-powered street lights on our road.
• To the East is the Bay of Bengal and in the North end of our house we have a Wilvam Tree or Kubar Tree
• Wilvam/Kubar Trees belong to Lord Shiva
• When we open the kitchen door we see a Thulasi Leaf Plant, this plant belongs to Lord Vishnu
• In our house we have Sandhana Vathana Marble. In the summer season, it gets very hot outside but inside we feel cool and chilly.
• The main road to our house is privately owned by one man.
• All the residents on our street need to pay a one time fee to the owner of the street to use the access.
• At the end of our road, there is a tennis court being built by a professional tennis player but was stopped due to the owner of the road disapproving of the dump trucks using the road.
• The entire land around us is owned by one family.

Example #3 Rahul

I live in an apartment surrounded by many trees around the neighbourhood. Not much construction goes on and the it’s usually pretty quiet. Many people take their dogs for walks including my family and I. I live very close to the beach so I could go to the beach any time I want. The beach is only 3 minutes away from my house. There are about 5 churches and 1 temple nearby. In the evening, a nice breeze from the sea blows across making it very pleasant. A lot of planes fly over the neighbourhood. In my apartment complex, I have 3 friends. Almost every evening, we play soccer down in the compound.


The journey to my school normally takes about 10 minutes in the morning. In the evening, it’s a whole nother story. It could take up to 40 minutes in the evening. There is so much traffic from people coming back from work. I have lived in my apartment since I came to Chennai which was about 1 year ago. I think I won’t move at all for the time that I live in Chennai. I really like my neighbourhood a lot.

Other Examples of Maps

Author Visit

We were fortunate to have an author/illustrator (Lauren Stringer) visit our school for one week last month. Below are some photos that show the students working with her in a workshop setting. They listened to find out the process an illustrator goes through when drawing for an author's book. Then they were able to create storyboards for their own short stories which they had brainstormed from a list of 4 words.

My observations of this activity were that the students were engaged and felt that they could be creative in writing their own story. There was a lot of choice involved which I believe is of utmost importance at any age, but middle schoolers seem to thrive on having a say in what they write. The ELL students were also able to be successful in this activity because they did not have to write a great deal of words and they used their translators to help them.

I labeled this with Standard 9 because it is about collaboration with other professionals.

Creativity: Nature vs. Nurture?

While researching Infographics for an upcoming project, I came across this one about Creativity. Since this is one of the four C's of our school's mission statement, I immediately saved it to my desktop for future use.  The part that leaped out at me was the one at the top in yellow and red. I really liked the idea of a personality shining through and the idea of both individual creativity and collective creativity.

A day or so later, I thought I might send it to my colleague to put on our shared student blog for language arts and social studies. We have been talking a lot with our students about the 4C's- courage, compassion, creativity, and confidence- so I thought they might like it.

Just before I pressed the send button, I thought, "I'd better read the whole thing first, just in case..." Well, I am happy I did so, because there are two quotes that I'm not sure I agree with and want to explore a bit more.
Is creativity something you are "blessed with" (born with), something "that cannot be taught" according to this infographic? Hmmm, that doesn't seem to make sense. So, you are either born with creativity or you aren't? Oh, so I can look around my class and say that some students in here are creative and some aren't? Too bad if you aren't, I guess.

So, I googled it: "Creativity innate or acquired"- yup, over 2,000,000 hits.

20 minutes later. I decide to look up a dictionary definition of the word Creativity.

1.the state or quality of being creative.
2.the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns,relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful newideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination:
3.the process by which one utilizes creative ability:

Still no idea what the research says. In the lower grades, creativity is often equated with artistic ability. However, if we look at the second and third definition above, creativity goes beyond the artistic into an ability to solve problems in unique ways, to invent new methods or processes to adapt to the world around us. Is this something that only some of us have? Or, can we nurture these skills in our students to help them acquire more creative thinking skills?

10 minutes later. I find this post on a site called Peachpit which touts itself with the tagline: Publishers of technology books, eBooks, and videos for creative people

In this article, Tina Seelig (author of the book inGenius) states: “Many people question whether creativity can be taught and learned. They believe that creative abilities are fixed, like eye color, and can’t be changed. They think that if they aren’t currently creative, there is no way to increase their ability to come up with innovative ideas. I couldn’t disagree more. There is a concrete set of methods and environmental factors that can be used to enhance your imagination, and by optimizing these variables your creativity naturally increases. Unfortunately, these tools are rarely presented in a formalized way. As a result, creativity appears to most people to be something magical rather than the natural result of a clear set of processes and conditions.”

She also believes that: "Creativity exists when we desire to solve that problem with relevance and novelty. Relevance requires that we actually solve the problem. This is also a common misconception about creativity, that any solution that is ‘different’ or ‘out of the box’ qualifies. This is only true if that solution indeed solves the problem. If I asked you to come up with an idea for a cereal box toy and you responded with a full-size water buffalo, that solution is not creative despite being quite unusual. It’s not creative because the solution isn’t relevant. It didn’t actually solve the problem. Novel, yes. Relevant, no. Which brings us to the second requirement of creativity: novelty. Novelty is a subjective measure of the uniqueness of a solution. The degree by which a solution is considered novel is an inexact measurement, it is different to each person. This is why we think creativity is so magical because there’s no defined plateau an idea must reach to be considered novel. Creativity is not absolute because of this characteristic. Novelty, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The key is to decide who the beholder should be."

She then goes on to answer my question like this:

"So the question of whether creativity is innate or learned comes down to this: Can you learn to solve problems with relevance and novelty? The answer, quite simply, is yes. In the same way you can learn to play an instrument or learn to speak another language, you can learn to solve problems better. How? The same way you would learn to play an instrument or speak another language: practice. If you are presented problems consistently and you choose to solve those problems with relevance and novelty, you can improve creatively."

In summary, in Tina's words:

"Creativity can be learned; it is a process that we can repeat and in that repetition, we find growth. Every one of us possesses the ability to be creative, regardless of the suppression that ability has endured over time. If you practice something with purpose and pattern, you will find that it’s not only getting easier but you’re becoming pretty good at it. We have had the ability to master it like a craft our entire lives. In some small part, perhaps we were born that way."