uniquely capturing the emotion-filled days of our lives in short poems with multiple stanzas
This lesson was built for WritingFix after being proposed by Nevada teacher Sharon Berry at an SBC-sponsored inservice class.
The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss. 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 :
Step one (sharing the published model): Teachers should stress, as they read the cited book aloud, what the author has done particularly well in writing this story: in this case, author Dr. Seuss has taken an old idea (linking people's moods with color) and writing an original story that uses thoughtful details to develop its ideas.
Ask your students to think of days that stand out in their memories. These can be really good days or really sad days. Ask students to think about what colors and images they associate with those days. Re-read several of Dr. Seuss's pages to help guide their thinking.
Tell students they need to come up with a basic description (combinging color, mood, and imagery) for three days they think of. Once they have three basic ideas, encourage them to expand the ideas into words that are poetic.
Refer them to the student samples attached to this lesson to get their ideas flowing.
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 idea development, since that's the focus of this lesson, but you might prompt your students to talk about each model's word choice as well.
We're looking for student samples for many grade levels for this prompt! Help us get some, and we'll send you free resources for your classroom! See this lesson's student samples page for details.
Step three (thinking and pre-writing): The interactive button game on the Student Instructions Page will give your students ideas for thinking up their basic similes, if they are still having trouble. They can certainly come up with color similes without the help of the computer though.
Submit a tool you created as you adapted this lesson to us at webmaster@writingfix.com
Keep reading aloud snippets from My Many Colored Days as they draft to inspire their thinking. Share student samples that shine. Let your students hear what interesting stanzas sound like.
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.
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.
