EVERYONE is free writing very enthusiastically, and begging for more time for free write.  Free write is the warm up for writing,where you get to write anything you want in your journal.  After we write, three people are picked at random to share if they want to.

Many of the stories are totally gory.  We have protagonists dealing with terrorists, domestic and foreign, zombies, garden variety murderers, and mechanized agents of terror.  An apocalypse, post apocalyptic horror, we have it all.  A few people are writing parody skits, and some of them are pretty harsh too.

Why the interest in this completely icky stuff?

Well, there are several reasons.  Fifth graders are beginning to leave concrete thinking and reason more abstractly. That means that they now realize that we can’t always protect them.  They can think things through for themselves in a way that they couldn’t 3 years ago.  It’s a more mature cycle of when they were four and wanted to know about death.

Many fifth graders come to this realization at about the same time that they are seeing themselves moving into the adult world.  This goes along with the brain development.  So if there is a crisis, many of them see themselves as a party who will have to take action.  This is empowering, but it is really scary.  Really, most of them know they aren’t full grown, and don’t have a great deal of life experience.  Writing and hearing the stories they are writing gives them a safe way to “rehearse.” We may not think they are assessing their options in a crisis, but that is what they are doing, in the best way they have available.

Life has never been safe, but this may be a time when we perceive more crisis due to the multiplicity of news sources, and the short news cycle.  And we have all heard “if it bleeds, it leads.”  We, and the children, see and news of war and crime every day. After the common advent of literacy, and before TV and radio, it was possible to shield children from some of this information.  Now, they hear it all.  Our response as a society has changed as well. We have fire drill, tornado drill, and most scary, lockdown drill.  This provokes anxiety in everyone, and most of all, in children who don’t have enough experience to assess real risk.

The teachers had a discussion after lock down drill.  The younger classes will believe that they are practicing to keep safe from stray animals.  I can assure you that every single fifth grader is completely aware that we are trying to keep safe from a crazy person with a gun, probably lots of guns.  These seemingly harsh stories are a way in which children work through their anxieties about these currently unavoidable subjects. And exaggeration of the possibilities, imagining worse than the worst, is a good way to make yourself less anxious.

These writing themes have persisted throughout the year.  I have been very interested to see that they have become much more realistic in a good way.  The fall stories were much more likely to have cartoonish, over the top, consequence free violence.  Now, writers are thinking much more carefully about the physical and mental consequences for their protagonists.  They feel pain and have lingering difficulties when they or  their families are injured. Protagonists also have regret and upset if they must injure or kill someone else. By the way, the dilemma involved in having someone hurt or attack your family instead of you is very prominently featured in their stories, so I can tell they are all very attached to their families.

I see these themes repeated year after year. The scarier the news, the more sensitive the students are to realizing there may be risks in the world that will cause pain to their loved ones and themselves, the more I see.  Writing is a really good way to work these anxieties out.  And as a side benefit, spelling and punctuation have improved tremendously in many cases!

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