The education sector in Ontario has been fighting a nasty cold -- aka bargaining with the Provincial Government over a new contract. After weeks of service withdrawal, full strikes and picketing, bargaining in the media (government), running negative spin toward teachers (government again), and lots of stress, the Catholic union managed to get a tentative agreement. Our public schools are still a mess, and we're not sure this announcement is good news or not.
However, we've been working away in my little corner of the world! I had success with my junior students who used the Picture Word Inductive Model to co-write a short story. We used a photo to build a bank of nouns, adjectives and verbs after giving it a working title: Fishing Day.
Once we had a good list of words to work with, students wrote their own stories in their notebooks. To follow the procedure more accurately, I would have completed this step as a shared writing activity, as one of my learners was unable to do this independently. I was away, and you know how it goes sometimes.
So, what to do next?
I had one of my students dictate her story to me and I wrote it out on the chart paper. I felt this would be similar to a co-write... right?
I talked to the group about finding sentences that tell about the where and the when of the story: the setting. I asked them to find and circle any sentence or part of a sentence with those pieces in green marker and I rewrote them in a list on another chart paper as they dictated them to me:
We read them over. Gee, they were sounding repetitive. Which word gives new information in each sentence? Hmm... the adjectives! Can we add them to one sentence? Sure can! We deleted the unnecessary details and mined the gems to add to the story. The bottom of the page shows the rewritten introduction with details about the setting, along with an introduction of our main characters, who do not get names until later. Here we had mini-lessons on revision, maintaining verb tense, and the order of adjectives!
Next up: the story.
This image shows a big part of the process. Up to this point, we had written the introduction. This was several days later.
We wrote out the sentences that really didn't have too much to do with the introductory setting. After reading it aloud together, we realized it seemed disjointed. The first sentence to pop out? "They are happy." The kids knew that happiness is a result of something, and in our story, nothing had happened yet. We decided to move it to the end of the story.
Then we tackled the time order of the story, and added some dialogue. We also realized that saying, "the man and his son" or "the dad and his child" were vague. After some discussion about using names of famous characters and people as not appropriate for this story (no, John Cena is not an appropriate name for a character), we decided Jack and his son Tony would work. I realize that "Tony" must be some fictional character they already know, but it's generic enough to pass muster.
You can see from the above picture that only one detail was not deemed important to add to the story: "they were wearing a black hat, so the yellow sun doesn't burn them". The kids understood that this detail adds nothing to the story -- revise it out!
It took several days, but the combined introduction and basic story are a vast improvement to the original stories the kids wrote. They learned about introductions, setting, time order, adjective order, past tense, revising unnecessary details, adding dialogue and even a short, but important conclusion.
We will continue with process writing like this -- they learned so much, and were so proud of their efforts to draft a 'real' story.
