This Lesson's Title:
A Scientific
Mishap
organizing a story with purposeful paragraphs
This lesson was created by NNWP Teacher Consultant Dena Harrison. Check out all of Dena's online writing lessons by clicking here. |
The intended "mentor text" to  be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book Dogzilla by Dav Pilkey. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author.
Check out Dogzilla at Amazon.com.
Washoe County teachers, click here to search for this book at the county library. |
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Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources:
Step one (sharing the published model): Have fun reading Dogzilla aloud to your class. Celebrate the word play that Pilkey is known for. Be sure to emphasize that the Dogzilla creature is a mixture of the traits of a dog mixed with the size and strength of Godzilla. Suggest to your students that perhaps the creature Dogzilla was created in a scientific lab… perhaps by an unfortunate accident. Have them discuss how they think this accident happened. Tell them they will be writing their own story about a scientific mishap that leads to the creation of a new creature.
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A note from this lesson's creator:
"I saw a B-level science fiction movie on the Sci-Fi Channel once: Mansquito. It reminded me of the title from Dogzilla, and the idea for this writing prompt just came to me."
--Dena Harrison
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Step two (introducing student 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. You might prompt your students to talk about each model's idea development as well.
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Step three (thinking and pre-writing): The interactive word game on the Student Instruction Page will inspire your students to create "combined creatures," but students can certainly find successful ideas for this writing prompt through discussion and brainstorming away from the computer. Their task is to combine the two word pairs into one interesting name that could be their story's title. (Examples: Dog + Godzilla = Dogzilla; Man + Anaconda = Manaconda) Have each student come up with three, then pick their favorite combination. After pre-writing on the two-page worksheet, require students to create a new draft on their own 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 Dav Pilkey's books
by clicking here!
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