Welcome to this Lesson!

Showing Credit Where Credit Might Be Due

writing a fictional account where an animal or object claims credit for changing history

This lesson was posted at WritingFix after being proposed by Nevada teacher Dayna Ayers at an AT&T-sponsored in-service class for teachers.

The mentor text for this lesson:

Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin by His Good Mouse Amos will challenge your students to re-tell history from interesting points-of-view.

Three-Sentence Overview of this Lesson:

Writers will be inspired to take themselves back into history and retell a famous event from an animal's or an object's point of view. Writers will thoroughly research their topic and brainstorm who or what could help their historical facts come alive. Through the use of believable “voice,” students will convince their audience of how history actually happened. Teachers: click here to read the entire lesson plan.

6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:

The focus trait in this assignment is voice; each writer’s goal is to create an imaginary person or object that persuades the reader to believe he/she deserves the credit for something historical, rather than the historical figure whose given credit for changing history. In his book Ben and Me, Robert Lawson does an incredible job of retelling the historical life of Benjamin Franklin from a mouse’s point of view. Lawson’s character, Amos, writes about Franklin’s faults and how it is really the intelligence of a mouse that makes Franklin so successful. The support trait in this assignment is organization; Amos retells the events of Franklin life in a sequential order after his dear friend, Benjamin Franklin, has passed away, and student writers will be expected to plan for and use sequence in their original stories.