Blue Heart Writing
Inspire your students to write with purpose and creativity!
“It doesn’t matter what your first draft looks like… the important thing is that you wrote it.” —Anonymous
Hi, I’m Carolyn Cerrito,
your guide to all things
writing in upper elementary.
Picture this:
What does your classroom look like during your Writing block?
- Do your students fidget?
- Do they groan when it’s time to write?
- Do they stare at the blank pages in front of them, tapping their pencils, unsure or afraid of what to say or how to begin?
- What is writing really like for your students?
Having written for most of my life, I never thought I'd encounter this in my own classes... until I did.
My realization...
Not all students like to write. In fact, many don’t like to write at all.
Writing doesn’t always just flow out of a person… oftentimes, it needs to be envisioned, mulled over, jotted down, crossed out, rewritten, nurtured. Sounds like a lot, right?
Seeing my students struggling through writing a first paragraph, let alone an entire first draft, made me realize I needed to change the way I approached writing with them.
I needed a plan.
Looking back at the writing workshops I’ve participated in as an adult, I recalled that we began each session with writing warm-ups. Sometimes it was an idea, other times a famous quote. Sometimes the topic was chosen for us, other times it was the format.
Just as dancers stretch their lean bodies before heading into an hour-long performance, writers visualize and make notes, sketch and doodle, type and delete, mapping out their ideas to craft that elusive first draft.
I realized I had to begin my Writing Workshop with pre-writing strategies, depending on the needs of the students in front of me. Some days we began with lists, other days with T-charts. Some days we drew character sketches with labels, other days we brainstormed details to get to the heart of the story.
Having solid writing strategies and routines in place helped chase away the fear of the scary blank page.
- No more cries of “I don’t know what to write!” because my students’ Writing notebooks were filled with pages and pages of their own ideas.
- No more grading 5-paragraph essays at home on the weekend or during a Superbowl party (yes, I did that too!), since I devised a strategic plan to get them all graded during school hours.
- I’ve been where you are: the uncertainty, the struggle, the overwhelm. It took a while to figure it all out, get organized, and feel confident in teaching my student authors, but I did it. And so can you!
- You can feel confident in teaching writing with specific strategies and routines in place.
- You can take back your time at home by implementing a simple plan for grading while at school.
- Let me help you figure out all the writing things.
you'll love these resources:
About me
I’ve been teaching for 23 years in the New York City public school system. I began as a substitute teacher in grades K-6, spent a year with two classes of 4-year olds in Universal Pre-K, and found my happy place in upper elementary for the past 20 years. While I love Reading, Math, and Art, my favorite subject to teach is… you guessed it… Writing!
Besides Teacher, my titles include Wife, Daughter, Older Sister,
Aunt Carri, Friend, and Childhood Cancer Survivor.
I’ve been writing since I was 12 years old and my diaries and journals have a permanent home on my bookshelves. While I wrote typical teenage diary entries and sappy love poems at age 15 throughout my experience with Ewing’s Sarcoma in 1989, I didn’t write much about my cancer until after treatments ended. Once I began journaling and exploring all I had been through, I found my true voice. Writing was cathartic, my outlet for the range of emotions I couldn’t fully verbalize while in the thick of it. Ever since, I gravitate towards memoirs, pulling myself deep into stories of survivorship, overcoming obstacles and hardships, and coming out on the other side to tell about it.
On any given day...
You can find me scribbling ideas for a poem, jotting down thoughts for a memoir, designing a teaching resource in PowerPoint, or journaling away with my music playlists and a cup of green tea.
When I’m not writing, I love browsing bookstores, working on my ever-growing pile of counted cross stitch, hanging out with my family, blasting Richard Marx and Def Leppard while organizing my home, and binge-watching my favorite shows (plus learning about WWE and the Marvel Universe) with my wonderful, comic book-loving husband.