This Lesson's Title:

Weird Animal Adventures

pre-planning your beginning, middle, and end before writing

This lesson was built for WritingFix after being proposed by Nevada teacher Lance Ferguson at an SBC-sponsored inservice class.

The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book Tuesday by David Wiesner. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author.

Check out Tuesday at Amazon.com.

Washoe County teachers, click here to search for this book at the county library.

Three-Sentence Overview of this Lesson:

Inspired by the wordless animal adventures found on the pages of David Wiesner's Tuesday, student writers will plan an original story about a group of animals weird adventure that happens after dark. Unlike Wiesner's text, student stories will be built from words that focus on interesting details. Before drafting, each student will pre-plan the story's beginning, middle, and end.Teachers: Click here to see the entire lesson plan.

6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:

The focus trait for this writing assignment is organization; "to pace" a piece of writing means the author has pre-planned equal attention to parts of a story that are equally important, and this assignment shows students how to pre-plan for this before writing a rough draft.  The support trait in this assignment is idea development; writers are asked to brainstorm the most important and memorable details before they write.