This week in writer's workshop we focused on writing about small moments. To help make this concrete and memorable for students, I brought in a large watermelon. We talked about how sometimes when we tell stories about things that happened to us, they are "watermelon stories." I like to think of them as list stories where students just list a bunch of things they did. We talked about how we can narrow it down to smaller topic. This is when I sliced the giant watermelon into slices. We talked about how great stories are sometimes about a small moment (like a seed in a watermelon). Students practiced taking a story from a watermelon story (large topic) to a slice (smaller topic) down to a seed (small moment). For example a big watermelon story/topic would be "My Trip to the Beach." The watermelon slice would be "playing in the sand." And a seed moment could be "the time when my mom and dad buried me with sand so I looked like a mermaid." We will continue working on finding small moments all month as we work on narrative writing. We use mentor texts so students can hear stories from "real" authors that wrote about small moments. The students did a great job and loved eating the juicy watermelon!! What a fun lesson! This week we also enjoyed our first popcorn publishing party (see pictures above). Students have been writing every day in August. They got to select one piece to publish. They shared it with the class while we enjoyed some popcorn. They will be put together in a book in our classroom library. They students did a great job completing their center checklist this week! They enjoyed getting to go to centers. We also have been working in small groups for math so students are receiving differentiated small group instruction based on diagnostic and formative assessments. Today we learned how to identify the characters in a story. We discussed how important it is to think about the internal personality traits as well as the physical traits of the main characters. I read the story Spaghetti in a Hotdog Bun. Together we described the physical traits of the two main characters Lucy and Ralph. Next, we talked about each characters personality traits. We used evidence from the story to prove our reasoning. Ralph, the bully in the story changes and goes from being the bully in the beginning to a buddy in the end. The students thought about themselves as a character. They were able to create a poster describing their physical and personality traits. Encourage them to discuss the character traits they notice in books, tv shows and movies.
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