SpongeBob WritingPants *Freebie

I recently reviewed my posts
and I feel pretty guilty.
90% of them are personal, not teaching.
While I consider those two things to be the same,
me sharing about how badly Twilight stinks
while cathartic for me
doesn’t help you in the classroom.

So here goes.

Are you ready, kids?!
Aye, aye, captain!
I can’t heeear yoooouuu!
Aye, aye, captain!

Ohhhh…
When do we learn about what authors do?
WRITER’S WORKSHOP!
We write compositions and in notebooks too!
WRITER’S WORKSHOP!
If beautiful language is something you like,
WRITER’S WORKSHOP!
Then get out your notebook! Get ready to write!

WRITER’S WORKSHOP!
WRITER’S WORKSHOP!
WRITER’S WORKSHOP!

WRITER’S WORKSHOP!

No, you didn’t change the channel.
This is the song I used to start Writer’s Workshop with every day.
You could probably modify it to fit your writing model if you needed to.
I haven’t used it this year
you know how you do something 
and then you just don’t
and you don’t even know why?
That’s what that is about.


Anyway, I wanted to share a little bit of the writing activities that we’ve done this year that have really improved the quality of my students’ writing.

Good writers start with good readers.
Want to write something good?
Write it like your favorite author –
or try, anyway.
So we spend a lot of time analyzing fiction structure.

This is our number one narrative buddy.
Once kids understand this, they can make far better predictions in reading, retell better, and write with a more coherent and deliberate structure.
(For this one and more fiction graphic organizers and formats, you can check out my Fiction Pack at my TPT store or Teacher’s Notebook store.)

And here’s a freebie for you too! Click it to grab it from google docs!

I start out the year with an author study of some great children’s author
(in fourth grade, we read Patricia Polacco out the yinyang,
in third, we read tons of Tomie dePaola.)
This year, these are some of the titles we read:
(We also read others, but I focus on personal narratives as models for writing).

Then we chart observations and reverse-map the structure on a fiction story map, or Freytag’s Pyramid.
This is a pyramid we worked on for Tom. I know some might think this is too difficult for kids, but I think it’s essential for an understanding of how text really works. And they master the language. I call it the Fiction Story Map, but we act it out as a roller coaster. Kids love it.

Then, we adventurously attempt to draft our own personal narratives. We do a lot of prewriting – quickwrites usually, identifying a relationship we have and a memory associated with it. Using a simple structure, I have students draft a beginning (character, trait, setting, problem), middle (rising action) end (resolution, falling action, heartfelt resolution).

Of course, they’re pretty horrible.

That’s a lot to take on for a kid.

But here’s where the real writing comes in.
This is my writing motto: Writing is hard. Work hard to do it.

So we get to work.
We cut apart their lame drafts
by sentence
(this is the first step for students to see that the first thing they write often stinks. Mine does. Revising is your buddy – if you don’t revise, your writing will fall short of your best)

Then we sequence them on a blank story map and glue them on.