bringing in Joe Friday to solve an original and silly mystery
This lesson was created by NNWP Teacher Consultant Corbett Harrison. Check out all of Corbett's on-line lessons by clicking here.
The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book The Web Files by Margie Palatini. 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): Your students probably won't know Dragnet. And that's a shame. So you may want to take a few extra steps before (or after) sharing Margie Palatini's awesome book, The Web Files, to familiarize your students with the show and the character she has delightfully parodied.
Amazon.com offers episodes of the TV show Dragnet available for under $10.00, if you look for them. You can buy entire seasons too, if you are a genuine fan. A few short segments of the show shown to your students can help them recognize the concept of parody.
You can go further back than TV too. Jack Webb was on radio as Joe Friday, long before the TV show became popular. You can buy a CD or MP3 of Dragnet shows at the OTR Cat on-line store, or you can download an episode for free at I-Tunes.
I-Pod Link: If you happen to have access to YouTube at your school (or know how to download one of their videos to your I-Pod), you can show a video clip from the old Dragnet television show, using the link below. If you can't see the video link just below, you are on a computer that doesn't allow access to YouTube; you can certainly watch the video later on a computer that allows you access.
Step one (sharing the published model):This is the classroom. It was Monday morning, and the students were learning. We were studying voice. Not spoken voice but written voice. I'd heard about the perfect book on the street. The Web Files, and it was by Margie Palatini. I read it out loud. The students howled with laughter. My name's Friday, and I teach writing.
This book is a riot! It mixes Jack Webb (Joe Friday) and Jimmy Cagney ("You dirty rat") together with wonderful puns! If you're going to read the book aloud, practice first. Some of the lines are tongue twisters.
This book also makes a wonderful reader's theater script. It can be performed in its entirety by a large group who has practiced it, or you can break the book into numerous scenes that smaller student groups can each practice and perform.
Celebrate the sounds of the book's character's voices. Celebrate the word play and puns. Celebrate the concept of parody.
Xerox a few pages from the book and hand them to student groups. Ask them to highlight the detective's narration in one color, and to highlight the scene's dialogue in another. Each interview scene contains both narration and dialogue. Your students' scenes will contain both too, so make sure they realize that the narration is voice-filled, but it doesn't use dialogue punctuation. The interviews done by the detective continue using the hard-boiled voice, plus they use dialogue punctuation too.
While they have the Xeroxes in hand, this is a perfect time to review dialogue punctuation. Have student groups study the dialogue punctuation, and ask each group to share one rule of dialogue punctuation they notice from Palatini's story. Create a classroom list of dialogue punctuation rules for them to refer to when writing. Make sure they spot that when a different character speaks or responds, a new paragraph has to happen. Remind them of this as they write their drafts, and accept the fact that two or three students will still lump multi-character dialogue into the same paragraph.
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 voice, since that's the focus of this lesson, but you might prompt your students to talk about each model's conventions as well.
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 students' assignment is to write out an introduction and three scenes of a mystery they have imagined in their heads. The mystery's narrator will be a hard-boiled detective, modeled after Joe Friday or Duck-tective Webb. The detective will question three witnesses or criminals. If they want their mystery to come to an end, their last witness will probably need to confess to the crime.
The interactive button choices on the Student Instructions Page can certainly inspire your students to begin generating ideas for this assignment, but you can certainly create a class brainstorm that accomplishes the same without being on the computer.
Requires students to plan out their stories before writing a rough draft. The mystery planning sheet below can be Xeroxed and filled out by student writers planning this assignment.
Joe Friday speaks in short sentences, and he uses a lot of direct address ("Just the facts, Ma'am."). As students prepare to write their three scenes, a quick discussion of direct address (using the overhead below) might be helpful.
For a review of dialogue punctuation rules, you can use one of WritingFix's rules of dialogue handouts.
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 Margie Palatini's books
by clicking here!
