Writing Both Inside and Outside the Classroom by Tiffany Rehbein

The view from my summer school classroom was endless.

Chris Ledoux, a country music star born and raised in Wyoming, said the following about his home state: "But if they ever saw a sunrise on a mountain morning/Watched those cotton candy clouds roll by/They'd know why I live beneath these Western Skies."

Every morning, a sloping blue sky kissing the hilltops on the horizon greeted me. Pink and purple Indian Paintbrush disrupted the grays, greens, and browns of the landscape.

Rather than view the vistas from the classroom, I began to wonder how our writing might reflect that landscape. Maintaining writing momentum from nature to the classroom happened quite accidentally.

To begin, I provided mentor texts that I read aloud. Students recognized great writing and powerful passages and sentences. Because the mentor texts were short, students were not intimidated by the amount of writing they were expected to produce. I told them we would be outside in nature; I asked them to write.  And they did.

I didn't intend to bring my writing into the classroom. After taking my Writer's Notebook outside to model writing for the students, I settled in to write a poem, my favorite genre.

We changed locations after 30 minutes, and my second approach to writing was a brainstorm of ideas for fall implementation at school. Writing is fluid, and organic, and necessary. Writing purposes change constantly. At that moment, it was necessary to capture my thinking as I planned for the upcoming school year.

When a student called on me to share during our verbal read around, it was unexpected, yet I shared.

A lone yellow-breasted Western Meadowlark
          sings his mating call
          to no one.

If you plan to bring your writing into the classroom this fall, here are some tips that I learned:

• Read it aloud (and proud!)
• Plan activities for students that you would take part in
• Arrange for mentor texts to show all the different ways writing can look (it’s okay to write a poem followed by a list of ideas to improve your teaching – let the students know that’s okay, too)
• Ask students what they need for their writing (e.g., My students did NOT need a prompt or an answer to the question,  "How long does it need to be?" They just needed time and space.)

Writing and the Wyoming landscape brought each of us out of the classroom and into a shared space of observation, creativity, and togetherness, maintaining writing momentum both inside and outside of the classroom.



Tiffany Rehbein is a former high school English teacher and current English Language Arts District Coordinator. She and her family live in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Follow Tiffany @Rehb31 on Twitter and follow her blog at www.tiff4tat.blogspot.com.