The picture book that inspired this lesson is the 2008-2009 school year's Mentor Text of the Year. Use this book! Adapt this lesson! Share a blurb! Win free classroom resources!
The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street by Roni Schotter. 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 :
Step one (sharing the published model): Read and enjoy this book by Roni Schotter! Her tale of a Eva, who doubts that a place she is overly familiar with can inspire interesting writing, is a marvelous story and lesson for writers. After reading, have your students recall the four pieces of advice Eva is given, then paraphrase each piece of advice into their own words. Share their paraphrases aloud. After students have paraphrased the four pieces of advice, read aloud the page from the story where Baby Joshua is introduced; it's six or eight pages into the story. Tell your students that, on this page, Eva seems to have used all four pieces of advice. Say, "I'm going to read the page again--slowly--, and I'd like you and a partner to be prepared to talk about where she used--at least--three of the four pieces of advice. If you need to write down a sentence or phrase that seems to have followed the advice in order to remember it, that's okay. I'll read slowly, and I'll probably even read it another time, if you ask nicely."
The worksheet provided below has spaces for students to record each character's advice to Eva, spaces to paraphrase the advice, and spaces to record sentences from the text from the Baby Joshua page. After students have completed the worksheet, have them talk to each other to note differences in paraphrasing and differences in the sentences and phrases they have taken from the Baby Joshua page.
Step two (introducing models of writing): Before having your students pre-write to create their own descriptive paragraphs drafts, have them discuss the teacher sample from below. With this sample, have your students look for phrases and sentences that seem to have been inspired by the four pieces of advice from the 90th Street picture book.
Step three (thinking and pre-writing): Time to brainstorm some interesting details about persons, places, and things, which your students will need to choose to write about. The interactive button game on the student instruction page above will give your students plenty of choices for persons, places, and things, if you happen to have access to a computer lab, or you have the ability to project this page to your whole class. If you do not have access to such technology available, in the next two paragraphs you will find an alternative method to getting your students to choose three nouns for their descriptive paragraph assignment.
Alternative method: Hand out six blank Post-It notes to each student. On the first two, have them print the names of interesting jobs that people have; I always say, "Don't be afraid creative. A wizard is an interesting job, isn't it?" On the next two Post-Its, have them write interesting places, but tell them they cannot use proper nouns; I always say, "If you like New York as a choice, just write it as big city on your Post-It." On the last two Post-Its, have your students write interesting items that people might have in their pockets, on their persons, or that can be carried in the hand; I always say, "Feel free to add an adjective to the object. Instead of flashlight, you might write broken flashlight."
Spread the Post-Its out in three areas, keeping the persons, places, and things separate. Have students come up to each collection and choose one Post-It they want to write about for this assignment. Encourage them to choose three things that can go together somehow, if they use their imaginations. Discourage them from choosing any of their own Post-Its. If done properly, students will return to their desks with three Post-It Notes: one with a person, one with a place, and one with an object.
When your students have a person, place, and thing to use in a descriptive paragraph, use the worksheet below to have your students brainstorm phrases and sentences they might use to describe the three nouns they have chosen. The first page of the attachment below is a "teacher model" to show on the overhead, and the second page is a blank worksheet for each student to complete before writing their drafts.
Step four (revising with specific trait language): Two tools for revision are provided below. You can use one or both, depending on how much time you have to spend on this assignment.
The "Revision Sprint" worksheet below asks students to determine which piece of advice from the book had the strongest influence on their writing. When students have decided which piece of advice they utilized best, they will draw an arrow on the worksheet that connects that piece of advice to the finish line. Then--and this is the important part--students will determine where the other three pieces of advice were when the winning "runner" crossed the finish line. Were the other "runners" hot on the winner's heels? Or were they hardly even out of the starting gate. Have students complete this worksheet, and talk about their decisions with each other or with the teacher, and then plan a revision. To inspire revision, tell them "One of your slower 'runners' must tie the 'runner' who won the first race, and you need to modify your story so that this can happen."
We also have a Idea Development Post-It you can use. 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 author Roni Schotter
by clicking here!
