Welcome to this Lesson:

What Got
Stolen?

using excellent details to launch organized, original mystery story

This lesson was built for WritingFix after being proposed by Northern Nevada teacher
Jenn Potter at an
SBC-sponsored inservice class.

The mentor text:

Grandpa's Teeth is a wonderful mystery about dentures that have gone missing. If your students don't laugh themselves silly at the book's conclusion, there might be something wrong with them!

Three-Sentence Overview of this Lesson:

The writer will plan a scene from a story where a character confronts another character about something that has been stolen.  Descriptive details need to take precedence in this scene, as only a limited number of dialogue exchanges will be permitted.  At the scene's conclusion, a surprise ending (like that from Grandpa's Teeth) should be encouraged by the teacher. Teachers: Click here to see the entire lesson plan.

6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:

The focus trait in this writing assignment is idea development; strong details that use action verbs and interesting adjectives should be encouraged.  The support trait in this assignment is organization; this writing prompt comes with a graphic organizer that will require writers to pre-plan paragraphs that have a purpose.

Recipient of the NNWP's
Excellent Writing Lesson Award:

Because of the quality of its resources and ideas, this WritingFix lesson was selected by the Northern Nevada Writing Project as March 2009's Writing Lesson of the Month. It was e-mailed to thousands of teachers who are members of the NNWP's Writing Lesson of the Month Teacher Network.

To quickly access all the WritingFix lessons that have been chosen as "Lesson of the Month," click here to visit the NNWP's archive. You can have a link to a high-quality writing lesson sent to you every month.