helping students organize an adventurous and detailed tale
This lesson was created by NNWP Teacher Consultant Corbett Harrison.
Visit Corbett's website 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.
If you are a Washoe County teacher, click here to search for this book at the county library.
Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources :
Step one (sharing the published model): The entire Choose Your Own Adventure Series of books (which originated in the early 1980's) were unique in that they put the reader in control. Choices could be made at the end of chapters, and based on their choices, readers were directed to the next chapter's start page. This was hypertext, before hypertext was a term on the Internet. Young readers loved these books, and they still do. Most of the CYOASeries are still being published.
You actually don't need to have a copy of one of R. A. Montgomery's Choose Your Own Adventure Series to teach this writing lesson, but talking about the series itself will start an interesting discussion among your students, and having an actual book to share and look at will get them even more excited about the writing task at hand.
Start by asking your students, "Who ever read any of the Choose Your Own Adventure books?" Even if students haven't read one, they generally understand the format of the books. Talk about what they know and remember of them. If you do have a copy of one, show it off, and encourage your students to start reading them.
Ask your students to generate a list of "elements of a good adventure story," by themselves or in small groups. Share and then create a classroom list. Try to highlight or encourage the following two elements on the classroom list: 1) an interesting adventurer; and 2) strong details that center around interesting actions.
Step two (introducing student models of writing): In small groups, have your students read and respond to any or all of the student models that come with this lesson. The groups will certainly talk about the organization, since that's the focus of this lesson, but you might prompt your students to talk about each model's sentence fluency as well.
Step three (thinking and pre-writing): The interactive choices on the student instruction page will inspire your students to think of ideas for their adventures, if they have any trouble coming up with an original idea.
This lesson comes with a pre-writing worksheet for students to use as they plan out their adventure stories. Xerox one for each student, and make an overhead of one for you. On the overhead, model how you would pre-think before writing, if you were writing an adventure story using this prompt. After they pre-write their ideas out on the two-page graphic organizer, you can use the two-page drafting worksheet as a place for them to write out their stories using actual paragraphs. Encourage revision (especially for organization and sentence fluency) as they transfer their pre-write ideas to the rough draft sheet.
Step four (revising with specific trait language): To promote response and revision to rough draft writing, attach WritingFix's Revision and Response Post-Its to your students' drafts. Make sure the students rank their use of the trait-specific skills on the Post-Its, which means they'll only have one "1" and one "5." Have them commit to ideas for revision based on their Post-It rankings. For more ideas on WritingFix's Revision & Response Post-Its, click here.
Step five (editing for conventions): After students apply their revision ideas to their drafts and re-write neatly, require them to find an editor. If you've established a "Community of Editors" among your students, have each student exchange his/her paper with multiple peers. With yellow high-lighters in hand, each peer reads for and highlights suspected errors for just one item from the Editing Post-it. The "Community of Editors" idea is just one of dozens and dozens of inspiring ideas that is talked about in detail in the Northern Nevada Writing Project's Going Deep with 6 Trait Language Workbook for Teachers.
Step six (publishing for the portfolio): When they are finished revising and have second drafts, invite your students to come back to this piece once more during an upcoming writer's workshop block. Their stories might become a longer story, a more detailed piece, or the beginning of a series of pieces about the story they started here. Students will probably enjoy creating an illustration for this story as they get ready to publish it for their portfolios.
Interested in publishing student work on-line? We invite student writers to post final drafts of their original at WritingFix's Community of Student Writers. This is a safe-to-use blog for students and teachers. No writing is posted until it is approved by the moderator. Contact us at publish@writingfix.com if you have questions about getting your students published.
Visit the Choose Your Own Adventure Website
by clicking here!
