This Lesson's Title:

Floating Down
a River

planning both pacing and details with a graphic organizer

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

The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book Daisy Comes Home by Jan Brett. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author.

Check out Daisy Comes Home at Amazon.com.

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

Three-Sentence Overview of this Lesson:

After studying the amount of details shared while Daisy floats down the river in the middle of Jan Brett's story, Daisy Comes Home, students will plan a story where they float down a river. Like Daisy, they will encounter animals as they float. Using this lesson's graphic organizer, students will plan a story that is well-paced by using an equal amount of details and sentences as they describe each encounter with each animal. Teachers: Click here to see the entire lesson plan.

6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:

The focus trait for this writing assignment is organization; "to pace" a piece of writing means the author has pre-planned equal attention to parts of a story that are equally important, and this assignment shows students how to pre-plan for this before writing a rough draft.  The support trait in this assignment is idea development; writers are asked to brainstorm the most important and memorable details before they write.

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 2007'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.