October!

I am now guiding my students to write a realistic fiction story and WW is moving along. After spending time generating LOTS of story ideas, we picked one and then spent LOTS of time developing that character well. What do they want?? What is getting in the way?? How will it be resolved?

This week I taught an 8-10 minute mini-lesson each day showing how scenes can included the narrative techniques of setting, action, dialogue and inner thinking and then told the students to get to work drafting. Then I used the 30 minutes of independent writing time to confer one-on-one with 4 students a day for 5 days and got ALL 80 conferences done!!

During the conference, I... 

1. went over the checklist that I scored their personal narrative on. I gave them a 3 for yes they did it (zoomed into a small moment, hooked the reader with a lead, stretched out the heart of the story, had a strong ending, and storytold it, not a summary) or a 2 for starting to do or a 1 for not yet. I added a personal comment that I read to them. It sounded like this - "You are a strong storyteller. Your sound lead hooked the reader and you added action and dialogue so the reader could see and hear what you saw and heard."

2. revisited the reflection sheet they filled out after the Symphony Share Publishing Party which required them to complete these sentences: I used to be the kind of writer who ____. Now I am the kind of writer who ___. My writing goal now is ____. I then write their goal in a big post-it so I could hang it up in the room for me to see and help them accomplish during the fiction unit.

3. Finally, we looked at how their fiction writing was going and I offered a tip to help them.

I am so happy to have conferred with all 80 students!! Now I need to plan out my revision lessons. The computer MacBooks are coming out on Monday and their drafts will be typed and then their revisions and edits can occur. Our Publishing Party is on October 21st!!