Ray Ch. 13

When I was reading Chapter 13 of Ray, I stumbled across something that I wasn't sure about. Ray talked about how she helped a little boy with his writing by offering him a writing craft he could use. The boy wanted to write about how there were so many feathers, and Ray told him, why don't you write like how Cynthia Rylant did when she wrote fields and fields and fields. She told him, you can write like this and say feathers and feathers and feathers. This bothered me a little bit, and here's why: I felt as if Ray was sort of writing his story for him. I like her idea of teaching children about writing craft and looking at other authors for inspiration, but I feel like she could have said something different where he would have come up with a way to describe how many feathers there were on his own. I think there is a very fine line between teaching writing and just writing something yourself, and I guess I am not sure if she crossed that line or not. I don't remember ever really being taught how to write, and I especially don't remember learning how to write creatively in elementary school, so I think it would be a really tricky thing to teach. I can really see how Ray's idea of reading like a writer would help kids to learn to be good writers, and I think as a teacher you can give advice to a certain point. I think it might have been more beneficial for her to say something like, "how do you think you could really describe how many feathers there were?" or else show him the passage she was thinking of and ask him how he could get his point across in a similar way. I'm wondering what everyone else thinks about this, because for some reason it just kind of bothered me the way she told him what he should write. Do you guys agree? disagree? (it's on page 246)