The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the chapter book Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author, especially from chapter 3 of the book.
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):In the book Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett, the main characters Petra and Calder find themselves in the middle of an international art scandal after a Vermeer painting disappears. Balliet grew up in New York City and eventually settled in Chicago. In both places, visiting museums was an important part of her life. Her own love of art led Ms. Balliett to create a book that is full of artistic words and references. Balliet creates a picture in her readers' heads by using great color and texture words. Watching the train, Petra sees, “a bright shout of a red hat, a child in a purple jacket pressed against the window, a bald head just rising over a stiff rectangle of newspaper.”
Introduce Blue Balliett's book to your students with this explanation: "This story is about a group of young friends trying to solve a mystery about real paintings by a real artist. The author makes special efforts to use lots of words in the story that would be the kind of words you would use to describe paintings and art. Why would she do that?" After hearing your students' opinions and thoughts, share with them from the book.
Read the first page of Chapter 3. Petra describes what she sees as the train passes her window. As she sees the people in the train whizzing by her window, she notices “colors sometimes left their shapes when things flashed by so fast.” Discuss with your students how the author uses color words and excellent adjectives to really create a picture in the reader’s head. Also point out that because the people are on the train moving very fast, Petra only sees colors and shapes.
Petra thinks like an artist to describe motion. They will be doing the same today.
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 idea development and word choice, because of the discussion prompt that comes with these on-line student models.
Step three (thinking and pre-writing):Next, explain to students that they will be writing about how something looks moving rapidly by a character. They will be using color and texture words to help their descriptions come alive. The interactive button game on the student instruction page will give them some good ideas and word choices, but they can certainly generate great ideas for this assignment away from the computer. Use the printable worksheet below to help students organize their ideas before writing. You might want to have an overhead version of the graphic organizer below as well as copies for the individual student writers. You might want to use the overhead to create a class model of this writing before asking students to write independently.
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.
Learn more about author Blue Balliett and Chasing Vermeer by clicking here.
