spice it up

Focus: Idea Development and getting attention

This lesson gets students thinking about adding some creativity to the details. It is based off of advice given to a character from the book Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street by Roni Schotter.
The advice is:

• Focus on an interesting detail or two
• Find poetry in your words
• Spice it up with action
• ask what if to find your story

Students will choose 3 specific nouns to write about in a short story. They will chose a person, a place, and a thing that will represent this person. Then they run down the list and fill in how they would describe each noun using each piece of advice.http://writingfix.com/PDFs/Pic_Book_Prompt_Worksheets/90th_Street_pre-write.pdf

Then the teacher will read the sample story right before students turn the worksheet into a smooth beginning of a short story.

http://writingfix.com/PDFs/Pic_Book_Prompt_Worksheets/90th_6th_Samples.pdf

Take Action

Focus: Idea Development and adding "showing" details
This lesson will take a look at verbs and how they are used to show personality traits in a charcter sketch.

Half of the class will recieve one writing sample and the other half will receive the other. http://writingfix.com/PDFs/Chapter_Book_Worksheets/Walk_2_Moons_8th_Samples.doc.pdf

The class first brainstorms about some ways to show that a person is generous. Teacher writes the responses on the board. An example, a generous person would give money to charity.

Then each classmate finds a partner with the "other" sample and reads out loud to each other. Then they have a discussion about the character and how the writer shows the character traits.

Here are some guiding questions for pair and share discussion:

• What verbs do you see?
• What personality traits do you think are being described?
• How does the writer show us these traits?
• What kinds of things does this person do that shows you what kind of peronality trait they have?

picture perfect story

Focus: Idea Development and adding sensory details

In this lesson students will write a short story about a picture by adding sensory details.

Show the sample picture to the students.

Read the sample story out loud.

http://writingfix.com/Chapter_Book_Prompts/Frindle4.htm

There will be five pictures to choose from.

Each student will pick their favorite picture and start answering the basic sensory questions.

What colors do see?

What sounds do you hear?

Is anyone talking? If so, what are they saying?

What kind of day is it?

What is the weather like?

What do you feel on your skin?

Where are you?

What emotions do you feel?

What can you taste?

What do you smell?

What other things do you see or hear Beyond the picture?

Once the students have answered the questions for a couple minutes, then they free write a short story.

Being a Writing Teacher

One thing that scares me about being a writing teacher is scoring the creative minds in the classroom. I know that is one of the biggest things I will struggle with when I start teaching, besides classroom management. I want my students to get real feedback on their writing and in a way that makes them learn from their mistakes. I must admit that the 6-traits of writing will help make this process of grading a writing piece much easier. Now I can have a specific and concrete checklist for students to check their own work and have specific ways to respond as well. Once I create a rubric based off of the 6-traits of writing, then I shall not struggle with questioning what I am scoring and how to explain it to the students. A rubric will also help eliminate personal preferences in writing and make me double check my writing bias. Many students refer to page numbers and appearance for a good paper but should be focusing on ideas and details. Sometimes longer is not better. In fact, in drafting, we should be eliminating the non-important stuff while enhancing the important details. Sometimes that makes a piece shorter, but as long as it follows the rubric it will be OK.

sample of me

The Landscape of Sickened Security

My gritty nails seize the barbed fence

Almost snapped apart like fish line

tempting to catch your siege and

cast it into the corroded cesspool.

The tipsy tremulous twine

unable to grasp the weight,

of plastic cards and Mercedes keys,

powdered glass and pip thieves,

bubble baggies and crack teeth.

My future cannot mend the cartilage

hardened like clay molded into a porcelain doll

with past parties gnawing on my bones.

My mucky limb extends, quivering

stretching to reach and conquer

summit’s intoxicating effect.

Ready to climb sunken valleys

and crawl over fallen trees

that clasp on and drag.

I should carve roots into soil

before the first frozen wind

twirls the last brown leaf.

Heres What I Have to Say About the 6-traits of Writing

The only way that we can assess students on writing is by being very specific about what we expect of them. The 6-trait writing tool is the perfect way to attack those specifics. Many teachers I learned from assessed my writing on grammar and punctuation more than on what I was trying to say. Sometimes I would just ramble on to achieve the length of requirement but not really say much at all. As long as I wrote in complete sentences, had the correct spelling, grammar and punctuation, then I was set for an A in the class. The entire reason many of us can relate to this same experience is because grammar and punctuation are the rules to writing and are easier to assess without a rubric. Many teachers assume that the ideas will come through the correct grammatical use. Yet, when students get a paper back with red ink all over it they feel defeated. There were very few times when I was told that I had something important to say or that I should expand on a wonderful idea I came up with. How can a student get empowered to write if they are not praised about what they have to say? We need to consider other things besides writing conventions like ideas and voice. According to Vicki Spandel, students write to find their voice so that is the most important trait in writing that we as teachers need to focus on developing in our writing assignments.

When Spandel discusses the idea of prompt writing I can’t help but think back to my years of pre-developed ideas. I had a teacher that was the master of prompt writing and used it frequently. In class she would start the ideas to write about in our journals and we would expand and develop the details. It was very informal writing and she told us not to worry about the conventions, just the ideas. That helped my mind get more creative and worry more about the voice and ideas than the boring conventions. I have read many students’ papers that follow all of the conventions but do not have a creative voice or anything important to say. Unfortunately though, these kids sore through school because they can follow the rules. We need to use this theory of the 6-traits to create rules for the most important aspects of writing; the ideas behind it all.

English Classes

There have been many positive classroom structures that included writing in my career as a student, but there have been many negative as well. The positive experiences have helped me become a better writer through the use of real and meaningful writing lessons. I remember learning that I enjoy writing when I was in seventh grade. The teacher had us keep a journal and would use the free-writing strategy quite often. I thought it was so cool when she told the class we could write, “I don’t know what to write”, as many times as we needed to. I think this is the first “writing-as-process” (Nagin, 36) strategy that I encountered. I remember the teacher explaining that as long as we just keep on writing something will come to us. She said that many writers write junk first and that junk is what usually springs the good stuff out. That made me believe that I did not have to be the best writer at first. Throughout the years I kept believing that and mastered the game of English class grades. The other eye opening experience I had in a language arts classroom setting was in college. It was in my poetry class. I had never had to write so much and share it all with the rest of class. It was the first time I had ever shared my poetry with anyone that gave me any feedback. It made the writing real. The structure of the class was based on writing, revising, and critiquing. We also had to model many of the poems we were reading and create our own using a technique we found in the poems we read. I learned more about poetry by copying others and also learned about my own writing and developing by hearing feedback from others. It was a win-win situation.

Many experiences that I encountered separated writing from learning and clouded my enjoyment of language. Throughout all of my high school English classes, we had D.O.L. also known as daily oral language. The teacher would put sentences on the overhead that had grammatical errors and the students were supposed to correct them. I did not care about that assignment. It separated teaching grammar from learning anything else. All that taught us was how to underline a letter that needed to be capitalized and properly add punctuation in non-relevant unrelated situations. Writing is supposed to flow, but this daily oral language approach separated the grammar from the writing process. It should be included. I also had very pointless papers and essays that did not create any uniformity with the writing to learn or learning to write process. My learning to write process was separate from learning and vice-versa unlike what Nagin writes about in his book Because Writing Matters. It was pretty much the opposite throughout much of the experiences I encountered unfortunately.