voicing a story about a sporting event or a recess activity
This lesson was built for WritingFix after being proposed by NNWP Teacher Consultant Patty Foncault at an SBC-sponsored inservice class.
The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book No, David! by David Shannon. 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, while enjoying No, David! aloud with their students, how the author has taken the everyday reality of rules we all have to follow and turned it into a humorous story. It is something they can readily relate to. The interactive activity below is intended as a follow-up to reading the story, and it attempts to inspire students to follow David Shannon’s example.
Read only the first half of the book aloud again. After reading, ask students to guess which word was used most: David or No. Assign half of the class to count the Davids and half to count the Nos on the next read-aloud.
Next, ask your students to recall how many different ways David Shannon strung those two words together. They'll remember some, but your students will also invent ways of putting the two words together that Shannon didn't use. Celebrate that creativity! That's the point of this writing activity!
Now ask your students to recall the complete sentences said to David in the second half of the book. You might cover up the words and show them the pictures to spark their memories.
Finally, have your students unpack David Shannon's punctuation. He uses lots of commas in correct places (between the interjections and the character's name, which most students don't notice at first), and he uses both exclamation points and periods to help us say the few words on each page with the correct emotion. Give your students similar examples to attempt to write, and challenge them to put punctuation in the right spots. "Yes, Sally. Yes. Yes!"
Step two (introducing models of writing): Tell students, "You will be writing a story today about a sporting event or a physical activity that might happen out on the playground. First, you will create lines of possible dialogue that might be said by characters who participate or observe the activity in your story. Then, you will use that emotion-filled dialogue in between descriptions of the physical activity, in order to make a short story."
To show them what you mean, show the two pages of the attachment below on your overhead projector. The first is a teacher model. The next two are fourth grade samples. Repeat these instructions after students have read together these three samples: "You will be writing a story today about a sporting event or a physical activity that might happen out on the playground. First, you will create lines of possible dialogue that might be said by characters who participate or observe the activity in your story. Then, you will use that emotion-filled dialogue in between descriptions of the physical activity, in order to make a short story."
We're looking for student samples for all grade levels for this prompt! Help us get some, and we'll send you a free resource for your classroom! Contact us at publish@writingfix.com for details.
Step three (thinking and pre-writing): The interactive word game on the student instructions page might inspire your students with interjection or character ideas for this writing task, but they might very well have ideas for their eight-sentence stories on their own. Have student writers commit to a interjections and character names. The graphic organizer below will help them brainstorm and compose all the different sentences they might use in their story. Modeling suggestion: As teacher, you might want to have a graphic organizer on an overhead that you can complete in front of your students with your own idea for a story.
Step four (revising with specific trait language): One tool for revision is provided below.
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.
Learn more about David Shannon's books
by clicking here!
