Teacher's Guide:

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle...

writing original songs (to familiar tunes) that help our environment

This original lesson was created by
NNWP Teacher Consultant Jodie Black.
Jodie also serves as Page Host at WritingFix's
6 Traits and Primary Writers Homepage.

This writing prompt inspired by

"The 3 R's" sung by Jack Johnson

Click here to do a Google search for the lyrics.

Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources:

Adapting this lesson:  The author of this lesson, Jodie Black, is an amazing kindergarten teacher here in Northern Nevada. Her innovative ideas and love of teaching have been inspiring the writing teachers she presents to for years now.

One thing Jodie is exceptionally good at is her ability to create a lesson for her kindergartners that all teachers (k-12) find relevant, and we're always amazed at the number of secondary teachers who borrow Jodie's ideas and adapt them to work with their own students.

Even though this lesson was written specifically for Jodie's kindergartners, we invite you to ponder her lesson's big ideas and consider how they might adapt for your own students. If you fall in love with this lesson (like we did) and use it with students of a different age, share your adaptations with us at our teacher blog that accompanies this lesson.

Step one…sharing the song and other inspiring media:  About three weeks prior to the writing lesson, I began by playing The 3 R’s by Jack Johnson during our regular music/song/singing time in my kindergarten classroom. We played the song over several days until most students had learned most of the words of the song. Next we took one lesson session to talk about the concepts outlined in the song: reduce, reuse, recycle. The text of the song gave us the beginning definitions.

About two weeks prior to the writing lesson, the children and I filled out a chart sized graphic organizer, to “develop ideas” in each of the greening categories we hoped to work on. Click here for an individual graphic organizer, which you might choose to have students fill out. Kindergartners can simply illustrate their organizer; click here to see how one of Jodie's kindergartners filled out his organizer with just pictures. Click here to see another kindergartners combination of words and pictures.

A day or so after we did our classroom graphic organizer, the children took home a pocket sized graphic organizer as homework. They were responsible for working with their families to list the ways they reduce, reuse and recycle at home. Click here to see one example of this completed homework. Click here to see another.

As students turned this homework in, we added the ideas to our classroom graphic organizer. Not all of the ideas from home were applicable to school, but we saved them, just in case. Click here for the homework graphic organizer.

Step two…introducing teacher models of writing: As a way to reinforce and enrich the thinking and activity that was going on in our classroom around our green ideas, I wrote two original songs using the tunes of two classic songs. I wrote these songs, inspired by a favorite classroom book: Take Me Out of the Bathtub and Other Silly Dilly Songs by Alan Katz.

We learned “Clean It Up” (sung to the tune of Let It Be) and “Take Trash Out” (sung to the tune of Take Me Out To The Ballgame). We learned the words to the songs and then learned to sing them to instrumental versions, of which there are many. Now, whenever we have a big mess in our room that requires some teamwork, I play our instrumentals and the children sing along while happily and greenly cleaning up!

Eventually we recorded ourselves singing the songs and played the new version of ourselves for ourselves!

• We're looking for new samples for this lesson! 

Step three…thinking, talking, and pre-writing: Using the ideas contained in our classroom graphic organizer, now filled with ideas from school and from home, the students each picked one idea to write about and to illustrate for our classroom “Green Guide Book.” I created a simple template to assist the children with the writing format. We used the mentor text Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?by Bill Martin Jr.

Our template looked like the following:

___________________, ___________________

What do you do?

I _______________________ at Rollan Melton School.

(McKenna’s completed text read, “McKenna, McKenna, What do you do? I try not to use the lights at Rollan Melton School.”) Click here for the a printable version of the template.

McKenna's final draft. Click on the picture to see it larger.

Depending on how much time you wish to devote to individual writing, the students can fill out the template and illustrate directly onto it, or they could copy over their text onto different paper. If you assist the children in using the graphic organizer to locate their ideas, they could find most of the words they need to spell in that location. Or, if you have them use the individual graphic organizer, jot their ideas down for them to create the spelling resource. In addition, if the children recopy their text, this provides an opportunity to teach the CONVENTIONS of comma, question mark and period contained in the text.

Older students might now be challenged to--inspired by my two models above--create their own Reduce, Reuse, Recycle songs that can be sung to familiar tunes. These songs can be written (and performed) by individuals or small groups. As older students create original songs, be sure to continue sharing from the Alan Katz book cited above. Katz is a master at choosing the perfect words to match the original tunes' rhythm.

Step four (revising with specific trait language):   If your students create their own original songs about being green, promote response and revision to rough draft writing by attaching 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.

• Sheet of 6 Idea Development Post-It Notes
• Sheet of 6 Word Choice Post-It Notes

Step six (publishing for the portfolio):  The goal of most lessons posted at WritingFix is that students end up with a piece of writing they like, and that their writing was taken through all steps of the writing process. After revising, invite your students to come back to this piece once more during an upcoming writer's workshop block.  The writing started with this lesson might become even more polished for final placement in the portfolio, or the big ideas being written about here might transform into a completely different piece of writing. Most likely, your students will enjoy creating an illustration for this writing as they ready to place final drafts in their portfolios.

Interested in publishing student work on-line? You might earn a free classroom resource from the NNWP! We invite teachers to teach this lesson completely, then share up to three of their students' best revised and edited samples at our ning's Publish Student Writers group. Fifty teachers a year who do this will receive a complimentary copy of one of the Northern Nevada Writing Project's Print Guides.

To submit student samples for this page's lesson, click here. You won't be able to post unless you are a verified member of this site's Writing Lesson of the Month ning.

Learn more about Jack Johnson by clicking here!