This Lesson's Title:
Three-Meal Weather
food-inpired adjectives drive organized writing
This lesson idea was built for WritingFix after being proposed by Nevada teacher Kaycee Goman at an SBC-sponsored inservice class. |
The intended "mentor text" to  be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi & Ron Barrett. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author.
Check out Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs at Amazon.com.
Washoe County teachers, click here to search for this book at the county library. |
Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources :
Step one (sharing the published model): Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, written by Judi Barrett and illustrated by Ron Barrett, is the amusing story of the town Chewandswallow. This is no ordinary town with any ordinary weather. Three times a day the weather in this tiny town turns extraordinary. At lunch frankfurters may blow in from the northwest with mustard clouds and drizzles of soda. Judi Barrett creatively describes the intriguing weather in this small town throughout the story.
Celebrate the powerful words (especially the adjectives) as you read the book aloud with your students.
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Step two (introducing 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 organization, since that's the focus of this lesson, but you might also have your students talk about the word choice in the writing too.
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Step three (thinking and pre-writing): Use the attached graphic organizer to have students brainstorm adjectives and food possibilities before they begin writing.
Using the graphic organizer, all students should be able to come up with a three-part description. For students who can go further, challenge them to add a dessert course! Or an introductory paragraph that introduces the reader to why the crazy weather is happening! Or both!
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Step four (revising with specific trait language): Two tools for revision are provided below. You can use one or both, depending on how much time you have to spend on this assignment.
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.
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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.
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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.
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