Literacy Mini Lesson III

I spent the last three weeks vis­it­ing a grade six class dur­ing their Eng­lish Lan­guage Arts peri­od. Dur­ing my vis­its, the stu­dents were work­ing on a cre­ative writ­ing project, focus­ing on ele­ments of a sto­ry, char­ac­ters, dia­logue, and set­ting. The stu­dents had already start­ed their projects when I first vis­it­ed the class­room; each stu­dent was cre­at­ing their own fairy­tale, con­sist­ing of unique char­ac­ters, set­tings, and sto­ry­lines. To start the les­son, the teacher read them a sto­ry that fea­tured a lot of dia­logue (Cin­derel­la Big Foot). She point­ed out how every­time a new char­ac­ter spoke, it start­ed a new para­graph, and the spo­ken words were writ­ten inside of quo­ta­tion marks. She encour­aged the stu­dents to pay atten­tion to the dif­fer­ent ways the author used dia­logue, includ­ing fea­tures like “she sneered,” or “she whis­pered” instead of using “she said.” 

After read­ing the sto­ry, the teacher instruct­ed her stu­dents to get their Chrome­books and load up their sto­ries. At this point, most of the class had already fig­ured out the rough out­line of their sto­ries and were read­ing to start imple­ment­ing what they had learned about dia­logue. As the stu­dents worked on their sto­ries, I cir­cu­lat­ed around the class­room and asked to read what they had so far. 

Big Idea: Lan­guage and text can be a source of cre­ativ­i­ty and joy. This was a great project for this age group; the stu­dents had a lot of auton­o­my regard­ing their sto­ry­lines and char­ac­ters, and they were excit­ed to express their creativity. 

Cur­ric­u­lar Com­pe­ten­cy: Use writ­ing and design process­es to plan, devel­op, and cre­ate engag­ing and mean­ing­ful lit­er­ary and infor­ma­tion­al texts for a vari­ety of pur­pos­es and audi­ences. Select and use appro­pri­ate fea­tures, forms, and gen­res accord­ing to audi­ence, pur­pose, and mes­sage. This project had every sin­gle stu­dent engaged in plan­ning, devel­op­ing, and cre­at­ing their own fairy­tale sto­ries. They imple­ment­ed infor­ma­tion and writ­ing strate­gies learned in class to enhance their sto­ries and cre­ate an engag­ing, cre­ative piece of literature.

Con­tent: forms, func­tions, and gen­res of text, lit­er­ary ele­ments, writ­ing process­es, sen­tence struc­ture and gram­mar. This project had stu­dents prac­tic­ing and devel­op­ing new skills to imple­ment in their sto­ries as they pro­gressed. Before each work peri­od, the teacher would intro­duce some­thing new stu­dents can prac­tice using in their sto­ries to enhance their fairytales.