Writing

We finally have another brave student willing to try her hand at blog writing. E.L. would like to share with all of you what she has worked on lately in her favorite subject. Without further adieu here she is...

I love writing. It is my favorite subject. Right now we are learning about descriptive words. We did an activity where we made riddles about mystery bags. We also have written letters from our Colonial Boston characters back to family members in Britain.

My favorite thing is writing in Writer's Workshop!!! It allows us to free write. I'm working on a story about a girl who gets turned into a fairy. Well goodby for now and back to my teacher.

E.L. mentioned about our descriptive memory bags. I wanted to share more about that to our parents and teacher friends. I put six items in brown lunch sacks (green apple, blue mitten, yellow highlighter, red color pencil, blue rubber ducky, and a frog stuffed animal . Sitting a circle students had about 10 seconds to stick their hands in the back and guess the item without looking.Many guess correctly with things like the rubber ducky and apple. However, what is their mental image of those items. We discussed that our jobs as good writers is to help good readers make mental images. To do that we need to write descriptively. We need to put items into context, add details, and invoke the senses. We then brainstormed different sensory words we could use as writers. I had groups break off and write a paragraph or riddle to "show not tell" exactly what was in their bag. This was hard for students because they didn't want to have students guess what it was too easily. I had to keep reminding them that the whole point is that they will guess it. We want everyone who reads our papers to have a clear mental image. Then the groups read their paragraphs and the students guessed again. They all guessed exactly write, down to the color. It was a fabulous lesson!

Our before and after guesses

Sensory Word Anchor Chart