The Power of the Gel Pen

Posted on by Michele Luck
The power of the pen has definitely changed since I started teaching many years ago. Well, actually it is the pen itself that has changed. We’ve gone from the reliable wooden pencil that required sharpening every so often to the mechanical pencil that kept us working until a needed refill to the erasable pen for even longer use, and now we find ourselves overtaken by the power of the 
many wonderful colors and amazing flow of the gel pen!
It is an amazing tool. It brings our secondary classrooms to life, filling in the grey with sparks of color, some beyond imagination. But, beyond the lively addition of color to our lessons, what other value can be found in the mighty pen?
The power of the pen has changed in the middle and high school classroom, and these suggestions for teaching with gel pens can take your lessons and activities from droll to delightful!

My daughter could give me 1000 reasons to use colored gel pens in the classroom. After all, she is a visual learner. At age 26, she squealed with joy at a recent present I gave her of an adult coloring book and a set of 60 (yes, 60) gel pens, including some with glitter!  Her excitement was even further extended when she got home to try out all of her colors, posting for me her completed picture on Facebook.  However, despite her true joy, I have to see things in a more concrete manner. I need purpose.

Purpose for the Pen
The power of the pen has changed in the classroom, and these suggestions for using gel pens can take your lessons from droll to delightful!The gel pens sold today can be a pleasure to use. They glide along the paper and induce a desire to add to your writing; to expand on ideas, to include details. This purpose is the most valuable!  For secondary teachers, the challenge with many students is not in assessing what they know, but getting them to express it in writing. The gel pen somehow has magic in the ink that brings young writers to life.

Application of the Pen
The power of the pen has changed in the classroom, and these suggestions for using gel pens can take your lessons from droll to delightful!Beyond the basic purpose for using pens in the classroom, there is also content application for the varied colors. In my classroom, SPRITE is an acronym we often use for categorizing anything related to Social Studies. History texts, current events articles, charts, graphs, images…. you name it, SPRITE works wonders to categorize it for future application.  And the gel pens? They help with that categorization. When Social is PURPLE and Intellectual is PINK, you can clearly begin to see the information fall into place in the minds of students. They can quickly retrieve the TEAL religious fact and explain its significance as compared to the GREEN technological components. They can see which colors dominate in a piece of text and can make judgements about categorical significance.

The Value of the Doodle
Finally, there is the value of the doodle.  While some teachers are aggravated by the doodle – Hello Mr. Silas Neslon, my high school Chemistry teacher in 1985! – others understand that this helps our creative juices flow even more. Doodling has been shown to help us brainstorm more effectively, to help us categorize and organize more efficiently, and to help us produce with higher levels of understanding and functioning.

The power of the pen has changed in the classroom, and these suggestions for using gel pens can take your lessons from droll to delightful!

Even though I am no where near as creative as my daughter or many of my students, I still love to use my colored gel pens. They give me a fresh glimpse of life! They take my day from droll to delightful, and what could be better than that?!

The power of the pen has changed in the middle and high school classroom, and these suggestions for teaching with gel pens can take your lessons and activities from droll to delightful!



Happy Teaching!