RUNNING INSPIRES KIDS TO WRITE
Learning and running go hand-in-hand by Carol/KR

I adored my second grade teacher and I always wanted to be at school.

I remember the classroom and where I sat and the drawer where my teacher kept the one pink eraser that we all shared.

School was very different back then. Second grade was only reading, writing and math. Everything and everyone in the classroom was orderly.

But everything wasn't wonderful. I remember my writing assignments. We weren't encouraged to be creative. We copied paragraphs from the board to learn to make our letters and to learn to spell. I had a hard time. I was not a good printer and I had trouble fitting the words in on a page. I can remember the paragraph about the elephant that I copied. It was tedious.

A trip to the teacher's desk to get an eraser was perhaps the highlight of the experience, but then I'd end up with holes all over my paper.

Now I am a teacher. I love to teach kids to write, but they don't spend any time copying paragraphs. They write to tell about themselves.

They write to be creative. I hope they learn to love to write when they are in my classroom.

I have found that children's writing comes alive when they are given their first running journal.
They easily write about their running experiences and look forward to journal writing time.

As an adult, writing is one of the things that I love to do most. It is creativity, relaxation, expression and sharing for me.

I wish sometimes, that I would have discovered my love for writing at a younger age. Perhaps I would have, had I been encouraged to write about running in the early grades.



I'm hoping that this Web site will encourage our young people to write and particularly to write about RUNNING! Please stop by again to read what I've written on my tablet.