finding a natural rhythm in writing to blow your readers away
This lesson was built for WritingFix after being proposed by Nevada teacher
Tamara McCollum during an
AT&T-sponsored in-service class for teachers.
The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the chapter book The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author, especially from chapter one of this novel.
If you are a Washoe County teacher, click here to search for this book at the county library.
Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources :
Pre-step…before sharing the published model: Before teaching this lesson to students, be sure they are able to identify word choice that supports the mood or tone in their writing. Students should also be familiar with replacing worn-out, over-used words with more interesting and lively ones to improve their writing.
Step one (sharing the published model): Preface the reading by asking students to listen carefully to how easy it is to enjoy the sound of Riordan’s writing. His writing is writing to be read aloud, and that is something to work toward in their own writing.
Share with students pages 8-15 of Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief. This selection begins at the second break in the first chapter and continues to the end of the chapter. Be certain you have practiced reading this selection first, so that you can share it with the students using appropriate intonation and emotion to convey the feelings of the story’s protagonist, Percy Jackson. This portion of the chapter describes Percy’s first, though not his last, encounter with a monster after him because he is a half-blood.
Tell your students that they will be writing a single scene that may later become a part of a longer story. For the purpose of this lesson, students will create a short piece of writing in order to utilize excellent sentence fluency and interesting word choice, modeled after Riordan's writing style.
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 sentence fluency , since that's the focus of this lesson, but you might also have your students talk about the word choice in the writing too.
We're looking for student samples for all grade levels for this prompt! Help us get some, and we'll send you a free resource for your classroom! Contact us at publish@writingfix.com for details.
Step three (thinking and pre-writing):The Interactive Button Game on the Student Instructions Page might get your students thinking about a scene for this writing assignment. If students can come up with their own ideas for an interesting scene, encourage them to do so.
Using this brainstorming graphic organizer, students decide on the who, what, when, and where of their scenes. They may also include other characters, if it is suitable for their piece. Students will then create a web-like brainstorm for each starburst, identifying descriptive words they might use to set the scene for their piece. Encourage them to select descriptive words with great care.
Students will then take the ideas from their brainstorming graphic organizer to begin composing basic sentence on this pre-writing worskheet; the scene the pre-write for here is centered around the action of their key characters (the who from their brainstorm). The checklist on the right-hand side should guide students to check their writing for good use of sentence fluency characteristics.
Have students transfer their pre-writing ideas from the worksheet into a paragraph or a series of paragraphs. Have them write their rough drafts on their own paper, or you can use this rough-drafting sheet with an additional sentence fluency checklist.
They will then prepare to revise as necessary and this piece can be included in a longer story or kept as a short scene.
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 Rick Riordan by clicking here.
