Note from Tamara, this lesson's author: "The goal of this writing assignment is to produce
a compelling piece of text that others will remember!
Here is the one-page assignment overview I give to my students."
Pre-step: Have your students write a personal decalogue that takes the form of ten rules to live by. Some great examples of decalogues can be found in: The Ten Commandments, Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, Because of Winn Dixie, A Separate Peace, and right here at WritingFix's Personal Decalogue Prompt.
Once your students have a first draft, ask them to share them aloud in small groups. Spend some time on a comletely different task (5-10 minutes is optimal), and then ask the students to write down lines that they remembered from their peer’s writing. This should lead into a conversation about what makes writing memorable; to start their thinking, you can use this journal prompt, or this more guided list of choices for them to rank. Enjoy the discussion as students get passionate about their favorite types of writing!
As a second draft option, discuss parallel structure with your students. There is a model and graphic organizer to help guide this.
Step one…sharing the song:Now that the class has established a general idea of what makes writing memorable, listen to “Everybody’s Free (to wear sunscreen).” This song can be found on the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack or can be downloaded from I-Tunes onto your I-Pod.
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 the video version of the song, 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. The subtitles on the video, by the way, are in Portuguese.
After listening to or watching the song, ask your students to recall their favorite lines from it, and help them make connections between those favorites and the criteria they’ve created for memorable writing.
After some discussion, surprise them with the fact that this was a newspaper article before it was a song! (Click the link to read the history, including the original newspaper column.) Have them listen to the song again with the newspaper article in front of them and look at literary devices used by the writer; use this list of literary devices to help keep them informed. This how and why chart might help guide this discussion as students identify the devices used by the author and ponder the purpose behind those devices.
Step two…introducing student 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. Each student model is presented in different format, although all began as basic decalogues. The groups should certainly talk about the idea development and sentence fluency, since that's the focus of the lesson. Also , students should note how the student models each have a purpose behind the final product, and each uses sentence fluency and language to achieve that purpose.
Because this is a new lesson at WritingFix, 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:Have your students choose 3 things that they liked best or remembered the most from “Everybody’s Free (to wear sunscreen).” They will be transforming their original decalogues, using new ideas to make their original ideas more memorable.
For their final product, students will be asked to completely change the format and genre of their original decalogue . They can use the buttons on the student instructions page for some creative ideas, if they have trouble coming up with one of their own.
Just as they filled out the “how and why” chart for the song, they can also fill out the sam chart when planning their own final product; if the product is more artistic than linguistic, students can still use the “how” section to explain color choices, symbols, patterns, and other visual methods, and then explain the purpose behind those choices. Click here for a "how and why" planning sheet, which also contains the rubric that Tamara's students use as they plan and assess their final projects.
Step four (revising with specific trait language): To promote response and revision to students' initial drafts, 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 the history of the song and video that inspired this lesson by clicking here!
