I have a suggestion about small moments or personal narratives in the k-2 Calkin's units. If you think of small moments unit as the textmap to write the narrative and use authors as mentors as the craft lessons to fancy up their stories... the kids' writing is naturally elevated. I have been teaching these units for several years and Lucy really uses beautiful language and wonderful show not tells in all of her minilessons. However, I do find that sometimes there is a bit more talk than my first graders can handle. (Probably from my delivery more than Lucy's suggestions in the units.) So I have combined several types of guru frameworks and the kids experienced a lot of success. This year I combined what Lucy has to say with David Middlebrook's textmapping strategies and the kids wrote the best stories I have ever read.... from first graders. I started with small moments and set the purpose using most of Lucy's talk. Then after we told the story across our hands and before we wrote a thing we analyzed a lot of Angela Johnson's books as suggested in authors as mentors. This helped us get the lay of the text (Middlebrook) Then we created a scroll that was divided into five parts: Lead and a stretch, beginning and a stretch, middle and a stretch, outside ending and a stretch, and inside ending with a show not tell. (The stretches are developed from Carl Anderson's ideas of how kids can expand their sentence by either 1) telling the next action, 2) telling their thinking or 3)telling what they said. Basically you end up with 2 sentences on a page. ..at the very least.. for example a kid might write on page 2 of their scroll... a beginning sentence and then another sentence with a quote expanding that beginning . A more advanced writer might write a beginning sentence and then write two or three more sentences expanding that beginning using several of Carl Anderson's suggestions. Once the scroll is completed then we go back and fancy that small narrative up with other craft lessons that are in authors as mentors: beautiful language, exact verbs, comeback lines, interesting title, varied punctuation, show not tells, personification, onomatopoeia...... I do not have the kids' work here but I will try to post one or two of the kids' writing so you can see how beautiful they write. Another thing I noticed was that the kids did not loose their energy for the piece. They loved to see it grow and improve..... we kept recycling that story for about a month....
What I learned is that kids understand craft lessons very well but it is hard for them to implement those craft strategies because of their lack of experience. When following a map that says put a beginning here... use a show not tell here ... their writing just takes off because kid thinking and kid language is just so precious.... Some have criticized that the writing is forced.... I tend to think it is directed. The kids themselves decide what will go where on their textmaps. I just give them a bank of strategies ...and they must use most of those strategies somewhere in their story. the scroll helps them make wise choices about that placement esp. if they compare it to a mentor's scroll..... I had a parent workshop after this where the kids taught the parents how to outline a family small moment story on a scroll. The kids directed their parents how to set up their five pages... in exactly the same format as described above. Because they were so adept at switching from content to craft... the stories basically got written in one class period. Well... at least it worked for me... thanks Lucy, Angela, Carl, David, and Shelley! **************Start the year off right. Easy ways to stay in shape. http://body.aol.com/fitness/winter-exercise?NCID=aolcmp00300000002489 _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
