This Lesson's Title:

Moving through a Machine

using a variety of transitions to explain the workings of an imaginary machine

This lesson was created by NNWP Teacher Consultant Corbett Harrison. Check out all of Corbett's on-line lessons by clicking here.

The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the chapter book Homer Price by Robert McCloskey. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author, especially from chapter 3 of this book.

Check out Homer Price 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:

After enjoying chapter 3 from McCloskey's classic chapter book, Homer Price, students will work together to expand upon McCloskey's description of how the donut-making machine works. Focusing on a variety of transitions, students will build a class paragraph that shows even more details than the original book. Then...inspired by the class paragraph, individuals or pairs of students will create an original description of food moving through an imaginary machine they dream up. Teachers: click here to read the entire lesson plan.

6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:

The focus trait is sentence fluency; students will explore a variety of transition word choices, and they will carefully choose ones that fit the step-by-step process they are describing with words. The support trait is organization; sequence and structure will be discussed and pre-planned for as students create their paragraphs.

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 July 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.