As I conference with students, I continually read process pieces that are lacking details and organization. When I ask questions and probe to clarify, students are almost always able to provide an abundance of information. It’s not that they don’t have the details, they’re just not good at organizing and getting them down on paper. In many cases, the students don’t have a clear picture of the piece. They add details as they think of them, with no real thought as to clarity for their audience. For others, the rush to complete the piece encourages students to avoid details that lengthen the process. The writing becomes very fragmented and generally lacks luster.

So how can we help students to realize the importance of putting small details together to create a big picture? How will students learn that details can be clues that foreshadow things to come, provide evidence or allow the audience to make inferences and or draw conclusions? One way to approach this task is by structuring the assembly of a puzzle.

To get started you will need three to six puzzles with twentyfive to one hundred pieces, depending on the age of the students. Divide the class into groups of three to five students. Give each group a puzzle in the box bottom, so they cannot see the box cover. Ask the students to face all the pieces up and separate them by edges and center pieces. Each group will need a marker and blank sheet of paper to record their predictions. As they look at the pieces, ask the students to make a list of clues they see. For example, using the picture in this blog post, the students might list, leaves, rake, grass, and buildings. As they begin to assemble the puzzle, ask the students for predictions as they add clues like kids, paws, tail, eyes, nose and so on. The predictions could include things like, I think it must be fall. I think the kids are raking leaves in the yard. I think the kids are playing with their dog. I think the big red dog looks like Clifford. Ask the students to stop when they recognize the image. Was it in the beginning, when they started looking at the pieces and listing the clues? Or was it in the middle, when they completed the border or much later, near the end, when the puzzle was almost complete. Show the students their box cover and discuss their predictions.

Remind the students that writing is like assembling a puzzle. Good writers use many details to create a clear picture for their audience. The details have to be arranged in the right order to make sense to the reader. Conclude the activity by asking the students to write in their writer’s notebook about how a good idea is like a puzzle.

Idea puzzles are another tool to add to your writer’s toolbox. You can purchase a nice variety of twentyfive to one hundred piece puzzles in both fiction and nonfiction themes, as pictured above, at your local dollar store. To keep the puzzle pieces from getting mixed up when working with multiple puzzles, I use color, numbers, letters or stickers to mark the pieces of each puzzle. For example, I put a frog sticker on the back of each piece of the frog puzzle. I put a blue dot on the back of each piece of the penguin puzzle. I had four Clifford puzzles that I used with emergent writers, so I numbered each puzzle and wrote the number for each puzzle on the back of each piece. It’s important to mark the inside of each box with the same mark that’s on the puzzle pieces. On the Clifford puzzle pictured above, I wrote the number 4 on the inside of the box and wrote a 4 on the back of each puzzle piece. I did the same thing with the other three puzzles. This was particularly helpful when working with similiar puzzles and young children. The students can check the back of the pieces and make sure that they go in the matching box. Idea puzzles are an interesting way for students to experience the big picture.

Source: Modified from BER