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. |
Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources :
Step one (sharing the published model): Teachers should first read the book aloud to their students, emphasizing, “Who do you think Daisy will meet next?” Advice from Karen: "Children familiar with Jan Brett’s books have discovered that by looking at the borders of each page you have a hint as to what might happen next. Brett has developed this unique style to help children predict what will come next. Subsequently, this technique lends itself well for children to organize their own writing into a step-by-step approach and to provide a satisfying ending."
Once you and your students have thoroughly enjoyed Brett's story as a whole piece of text, go back and re-read just the pages in the center where Daisy encounters the animals. Point out how each animal is given equal time in the story, and how a fairly equal amount of details and sentences are used to describe the encounter. In good writing, this is called "pacing," and writers learning about organization need to plan a story where they try the same thing.
What's bad pacing in writing? Students always enjoy hearing the story of the student who wanted to write about his summer trip to Disneyland. He spent five pages describing the packing of the family' vehicle, then was so tired of writing that he only spent a half of a page describing the actual rides. This is poorly planned pacing.
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Step two (introducing student models of writing): Before having your students pre-write to create their own descriptive paragraphs, have them discuss any of the student samples that come with this writing lesson. Have students count the number of sentences and details in each writer's sample so they can decide how well the pacing of the story came across to the reader.
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Step three (thinking and pre-writing): Time to plan a well-paced story. The interactive button game on the student instruction page will give your students plenty of choices for different rivers to write about. Once they have decided that, they can use the pre-writing worksheet and the drafting worksheet to plan their stories.
Encourage your writers to use the most memorable and interesting details on their brainstorming sheets! You'll be surprised how many of those details make their way to the story's first draft!
Require your students to write the sentences they put on the drafting worksheet onto a lined piece of paper.
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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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Learn more about Jan Brett's books
by clicking here!
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