Activities designed to build community in a writing classroom

1. Do an introductory activity in which the students write letters to the class explaining with it would be important to know about them. I would recommend collecting the free writes as well as sharing them.  This might serve to remind you, as the teacher, of what students felt it was important for the class to know about them.

2. Have students interview each other, taking notes about as many basic facts as they can learn about the other person in a specified amount of time.  Then separate the pairs.  The assignment is to write a short story, or a vignette or scene using the person you interviewed as a character.  You must stay with any of the facts you learned about that person.  If you learned that the person grew up in New York City, you are not free to have your character grow up on a farm in the Midwest.  However, you may make up anything about the character which you did not learn in your interview.  Students seem to find this activity highly motivating.

3. As an introduction to collaborative writing or group work, try the following.  Cut out headlines from a newspaper like News of the World the kind of newspaper that reports that one out of four US senators is a space alien. Ask the students, in groups of three, to write an article to go along with the headline.

4. Another motivating activity to introduce group work is to give students a situation involving three people. Some of the ones I have used in the past are: husband, wife and marriage counselor; two children and a parent arguing over who put the dent in the family car; two girls and a boy (or two boys and a girl) where there is a love triangle; two students and a teacher where there are identical answers on the students’ exams.  Ask the groups to write a script for the dialogue between the characters.  Sometimes each student can assume a role and supply the dialogue for his or her character.  When they are completed, it is fun to perform them for the class.

5. Set up a variety of formats for sharing, but do not allow sharing to be optional in the writing class.  I prefer to begin with whole-group sharing, so that I can model the type of behavior I want to see in a sharing situation.  Never allow students to be disrespectful in a sharing situation. Confront this behavior as soon as it surfaces. Part of your responsibility is to teach them to respond to each other in a caring and supportive manner.

6. Linda Reif has an interview activity on page 43 of her text (Seeking Diversity) which I have used with some success.  I have also adapted her positive-negative graph activity (page 49) by having students map their lives. This is fun, especially if you do it with multi-colored markers and other art materials.  I then ask them to focus on one aspect of their charts and begin a more focused map.  The larger maps of their lives serve as a reservoir of topic ideas.

7. Have students bring in baby pictures.  This in itself is a bonding experience. Most of us were cute as babies.  You can mix the pictures up and see if the students can guess whose picture is whose.  The writing activity involves having students write about the pictures from three different perspectives.  The first paragraph is a description of what an objective observer would see in the picture.  (I see a girl sitting on a couch holding a baby)  The second paragraph is written from the perspective of the student’s younger self (Why do my parents always make me pose holding my stupid little brother?)  The third paragraph is a reflection from the student’s more mature self (My parents always liked my little brother better than me)  The structure of the activity almost guarantees interesting writing and sharing of these pieces helps to create community.