The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book Halloween Hoots and Howls by Joan Horton. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author.
Washoe County teachers, click here to search for this book at the county library.
Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources:
Pre-step (before sharing the published model):
Step one (sharing the published model):Put a chart on the board entitled Halloween Word Bank. Read the first poem from Horton’s book. Then read the poem again, asking the students to tell you to stop reading when they hear a good Halloween word to put on the chart. When the poem is completed, read the charted words aloud as a group. Continue reading through all the poems the same way. After each addition of words to the Word Bank, ask students to reread all of the words.
Cut the Word Bank chart into individual words. Give each student 3-5 words. You take a handful of words as well. Ask the students to sit in a semi-circle with their words as you start the first sentence of the poem with two (or more) of your words:
bats
moon
Place the words on the floor, and then ask if any student has a word which could describe the bats. As students find words which meet this criteria and place their words in the appropriate position in the sentence, you continue asking for words to complete the first sentence. “Does anyone have a word that shows what the bats are doing? Does anyone have a word to describe the moon?” Keep some blank cards to add words which are not from the Word Bank but are needed for the poem to make sense. Continue with this activity until you and the students feel like the poem is complete. Be sure to reread the poem constantly as you build it. Publish the class poem, like this one:
Halloween Night by Mrs. York's second grade class
Nasty flying coal black bats screeching at the mysterious moon,
Warty wrinkled wicked witches cackling and mumbling and chortling,
Spooky stretching scratching black cats creeping delightfully in the dark disgusting shadows,
Orange moldy crazy Jack-o-Lanterns showing off their grumpy faces,
Yucky boney shivering skeletons stalking creepy mummies,
See-through stomping ghastly ghosts haunting graveyards saying, “Oooooh!”
Plump spitting spiders hiding in dark messy webs,
Stiff-legged frightful Frankenstein monsters muttering and bellowing,
“Trick or Treat,”
Everyone dressed in their costumes for a fun Halloween night.
Step two (introducing student models of writing): In small groups, have your students read and respond to any or all of the individual student models that come with this lesson. The groups should certainly talk about the word choice , but you might also have your students talk about the conventions in the writing too.
Three sixth graders--Shannon, Avery, and Jack--share their poems.
We're looking for student samples from grades not represented here yet. Visit our student samples page for information.
Step three (thinking and pre-writing): Inspired by your class poem and other student samples, now challenge students to create their own Halloween poems that focus on word choice.
The interactive word game on the student instruction page is designed to give students an image to launch their poems. Karen also provides you with this list of Halloween words to post or hand out to students as a word choice bank. Encourage your students to change the forms of certain words, if necessary; be sure they think about spelling rules, if they change word forms.
After challenging students to make individual poems that use different words than the class's poem, have writers compose their individual poems on their own pieces of paper. You might re-read Halloween Hoots and Howls again, if you see your kids needing some word choice inspiration.
Step four (revising with specific trait language): 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.
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.
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.
