This Lesson's Title:

A Hurricane Blowing In

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.

Check out The Lightning Thief 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:

Using Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief as a model, writers will find a rhythm in their writing by varying sentence lengths while creating a scene to draw in their readers. The writer will paint a picture with words in order to describe the scene so that it sounds as though it is a description of an event by a friend. Writers will carefully select appropriate words to make the reader feel as though they are a part of the scene. Teachers: click here to read the entire lesson plan.

6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:

The focus trait of this lesson is sentence fluency; during drafting and revision, students will work to intertwine simple and complex sentences that create writing that is meant to be read aloud. The support trait for this lesson is word choice; students will select words that paint a picture and make the reader feel as though they are there.