This Lesson's Title:

Special Places
to Love

improving sentences with thoughtful prepositional phrases

This lesson idea was built for WritingFix after being proposed by NNWP Teacher Consultant Kim Polson at an SBC-sponsored inservice class.

The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book All the Places to Love by Patricia MacLachlan. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author.

Check out All the Places to Love at Amazon.com.

Washoe County teachers, click here to search for this book at the county library.

Three-Sentence Overview of this Lesson:

Students write a paragraph about a special place they remember, then search for prepositional phrases in their rough draft. After a read-aloud of All the Places to Love, students talk about Patricia MacLachlan's use of prepositional phrases to give her sentences flow. Students revise their special place paragraphs to use meaningful prepositional phrases that share memorable details. Teachers: Click here to see the entire lesson plan.

6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:

The focus trait in this writing assignment is sentence fluency; writers are to consciously consider using more prepositional phrases in their sentences, especially in their sentences' beginnings. The support trait here is idea development; prepositional phrases--like Patricia MacLachlan's--share high quality details, and as students add them to their writing, they should be encouraged to carefully craft detail-filled prepositional phrases.

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 October 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.