Friends, I have been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad blogger! 🙁 For this, I am so sorry. I am going to try my very best to blog more because I absolutely love doing it! My life has just been totally, upside down crazy the last few weeks!! I have absolutely felt like I was on a roller coaster, so I decided to make my lesson plans align with my feelings. :o)
I looooove using the book, Roller Coaster to teach how to write about a small moment.
This ENTIRE book is the story of riding a roller coaster, from the minute they walk up to get in line, to the minute they get off. NOT when they woke up, then went to the park, then walked around, then ate lunch, then rode the roller coaster, then went home. (Sound familiar to anyone??) Ha!
To get them thinking about JUST the small moment they are going to write about, I have them draw a “snapshot.” They must show only what would be in a photograph- so they can only be doing one thing in that picture. Then, they label it and write details about that moment using their five senses.
Here is how I set it up- you can also see I had them think of how they would introduce and end the story on the sides.
I began writing my small moment story on chart paper to give them an idea of how to get started. My small moment happened, unfortunately, just this week on Monday!
I pointed out how much I had already written, but I had only just BEGUN the “small moment!” I showed them how I had to set the scene for my reader. :o)
Of course, since I was using Roller Coaster for writing, I also used the mentor sentence from my fourth pack and we worked on prepositions from my fourth interactive language arts notebook, too!
We are still chugging along learning about our explorers using my Explorers Pack.
We actually did this one last week, but with Columbus Day coming up, I thought I’d offer it to you… for free! You can download it here from my TPT store. I appreciate your feedback if you download the freebie! :o)
We also made brochures to advertise for a CRUISE with the explorer! :o) This one is from one of my super high gifted kids… *they don’t all look this amazing…*
Lastly, we are learning to write good, in depth responses to what we read! I am using an amazing pack from Jennifer Findley this year to help my students write better responses. Here is the one we wrote together this week to “try it out.” Next week, they’ll write their own!
So you see, even though my blogging has been a bit lacking, we’ve still been doing tons of fun things!! I hope you can borrow some ideas from this post for your own classroom! :o) Have a great weekend!
