This Lesson:

Short Adventure Stories

helping students organize an adventurous and detailed tale

This on-line lesson is dedicated to the memory of Michael Borilla, who was the fifth grade teacher of WritingFix's webmaster. Decades ago, Mr. Borilla hosted a short adventure story contest for his students (including our webmaster), which you can read more about by clicking here.

The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is any of the Choose Your Own Adventure books by R. A. Montogomery. Before writing, students should listen to excerpts from and discuss the structure of these popular books.

Check out The Abominable Snowman (Choose Your Own Adventure #1) at Amazon.com.

If you are a Washoe County teacher, click here to search for this book at the county library.

Three-Sentence Overview of this Lesson:

Inspired by the interactive plot ideas below, writers will create an original three-paragraph adventure story.   First, each writer will create an original adventurer.  Next, each writer will place the adventurer in a brief, organized adventure that could then be expanded into an entire story.  Teachers: click here to read the entire lesson plan.

6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:

The focus trait in this writing assignment is organization; the paragraph questions on the graphic organizer will give your students a chance to think about how paragraphs need to have a purpose.  The support trait in this assignment is sentence fluency; the paragraph challenges on the graphic organizer will require students to vary their sentence beginnings and their sentence lengths.  Once your students have rough drafts of their three paragraphs and have met the individual paragraph challenges, ask them to use the three challenges in all three paragraphs with their next draft.

Recipient of the NNWP's
Excellent Writing Lesson Award:

Because of the quality of its resources and ideas, this WritingFix lesson was selected by the Northern Nevada Writing Project as December 2009's Writing Lesson of the Month. It was e-mailed to thousands of teachers who are members of the NNWP's Writing Lesson of the Month Teacher Network.

To quickly access all the WritingFix lessons that have been chosen as "Lesson of the Month," click here to visit the NNWP's archive. You can have a link to a high-quality writing lesson sent to you every month.