Writing Workshop: Show Don't Tell

My students have been busy during our writing workshop over the past few weeks. They have been working on writing fiction, specifically spooky stories. The jumping off point was a picture that I used for a quickwrite prompt at the beginning of the month from Meg Hicks.

This became the setting of their stories. Students worked on writing their original draft of the story in their writing notebooks. During this time, we had mini lessons related to overused words and vivid verbs (read this post). Once drafts were completed, students typed that draft using Google Drive. Then revisions began. Their first task was to find all their verbs and replace with vivid verbs, revising the sentences.

As students worked through this, I was conferencing with them about "show don't tell" and making sure they included a fully developed problem in their story.  I had a chance to read everyone's draft last weekend, and had an "uh-oh" moment. I realized that many of my students had just listed actions in their stories - there was no real problem, no elaboration. So I reached out to what has become my teaching support group on Voxer. They provided much needed support - not only with ideas to help my students, but also stating that they in fact have this issue with many of their students. Doesn't it always make you feel better to know you're not alone?!

I crafted my lessons for the following week to address this technique of elaboration in writing. We began by looking at a handout that showed "tell" sentences vs. "show" sentences. I had my students notice and note what the differences were between these. A few things they said were that the show sentences really helped them, as readers, imagine what was going on. They noted specifically the use of adjectives, vivid verbs, as well as description of body language and emotion.

Then we tried our hand at taking a boring "telling" sentence and changing it to a "showing" sentence by adding descriptives to the subject and object and changing the verb from an overused to a vivid verb based on different emotions. Our boring sentence was: The boy ran up the stairs. I walked around in front of them acting out the emotion I wanted them to use. As I acted, they guessed the emotion (example: sad, excited, scared). I asked them how they knew if I hadn't told them, which got them to name what I did with my face and my body. Then they crafted a sentence expressing what they had seen.

The last thing we did was to look at two paragraphs. I gave them the least descriptive to start - "tell" paragraph.

Jessie tied his shoelaces.  He couldn’t seem to tie them.  He was feeling kind of sick.  The big game today would decide who would be champions – state champions.  Playing goalie wasn’t ever easy.  He knew if he wasn’t at his best today, the team would probably lose. He grabbed his jacket.  He walked out the door.  “Bye, Mom,” he said.  “I’ll see you later at the game.”  He walked to the bus stop.

We read it together and I asked them to tell me what they thought about it. Could they imagine the scene? How did the main character feel in this paragraph? What did the author do to let you know as a reader?

Then I gave them the "show" version.

Jessie fumbled with his shoelaces.  He couldn’t seem to tie them with his shaking hands.  A sickening feeling in his stomach was creeping up into his throat.  The big game today would decide who would be champions – state champions.  Playing goalie wasn’t ever easy.  He knew if he wasn’t at his best today, the team would probably lose.  As he grabbed his jacket, he shook his head to clear his mind.  His legs felt like spaghetti noodles as he trudged down the steps while holding on to the banister.  “Bye, Mom,” he called out weakly.  “I’ll see you later at the game.”  He swallowed hard and walked to the bus stop.

The light went on! They had the "aha" moment. They were excited by the changes the author made and immediately named techniques the author used, citing examples from the paragraph that showed these changes.

They now have a clear understanding of what it means to write descriptively as an author so that their reader can really visualize their story.  Now we are working to implement these techniques in our drafts. It is a long process, but it is so exciting to see them really trying and growing as authors!

How do you help your students learn about revision strategies?

Beginning Revisions - Vivid Verbs

It's been quite a while since I posted. Sorry about that but things have been crazy! Tonight's will be a quick post, just updating you as to what's happening in my classroom.

We have been writing spooky stories. Students have completed writing their initial draft of their stories. Towards the end of last week, they began typing their drafts. We use Google Drive as their portfolio, which will build through the remainder of their time at our school. So, last week everyone learned how to log on to Google Drive, begin a new document, name it and share it with me. Most students finished typing their draft last week, so tomorrow we'll begin revisions.

My first revision lesson has to do with vivid verbs.  We have a funeral for the overused words like said, walk, ran, etc. Then students generate a list of alternate verbs that are more descriptive. I will read our mentor text, Stellaluna, and have students jot down vivid verbs they hear in the story. We'll go through and share those and discuss the author's deliberate use of word choice. Next, we'll have a quick activity of practicing vivid verb word choice with a set of task cards. This allows the students to get up and move around the room and get their brains creating.  Finally, students will highlight the verbs they used in their stories and try and replace them with more descriptive vivid verbs. This is always an exciting revision to begin with because students can really see how their word choice improves their stories.

If you're interested in some vivid verbs for display in your room or practice for your students, visit my Teacherspayteachers store, Are We There Yet?

Celebrating Dot Day

Today we celebrated International Dot Day and The Dot by Peter Reynolds. We have been talking about fixed vs growth mindset. My students related the idea of Vishta feeling like she "can't" paint to a fixed mindset. We've talked a lot about the importance of that three letter word, "yet," and what a difference it makes. The students did an awesome job relating growth mindset to Vishta's change in in the end when she helps another little boy see his potential as an artist. This is something we'll be focusing on all year.

After sharing the book, students drew their own dots. We then used the Quiver app to turn their one-dimensional dots into 3-D dots. Here are a few of my student's dots - before and after.

What did you do to celebrate Dot Day?

First Inquiry Unit in US History and Technology

I have been participating in a Voxer group with some fantastic teachers from across the country, and we are discussing writing about reading. We worked together to practice writing about reading over the summer in two rounds of book clubs. Our purpose was to participate in writing about reading as we ask our students to. It was definitely a learning experience! From there, we extended our group chat to continue throughout the year - it's fantastic! Talk about a wonderful personal learning network...these ladies are full of wonderful ideas that they are very willing to share, support for when things don't go according to plan, as well as helping each other to really further our thinking in how to meet the needs of our kids.

So Margaret Simon and I have chatted a bit back and forth about some technology for our kids to use and our frustrations:) She hosts Digi Lit Sundays over on her blog, Reflections on the Teche. (If you don't follow her - she's a must. She also tweets regularly about what's happening in education @MargaretGSimon.) Today, I'm linking up with her and sharing a little bit about how some of my students are using technology in the classroom right now.

This year, I'm trying something different. One of the subjects I teach is US History to my fifth graders. We have a textbook. (Did you just fall asleep?) In the past I have struggled with feeling like I need to teach my kiddos how to read the textbook, how to take notes, take tests from the book, etc., because when they leave me and head to our middle school, the middle school social studies teacher relies solely on the textbook. If he has the kids do any projects, it is to choose a chapter and they're responsible for teaching it to the class. It is a real struggle for the kids to understand the textbook. I tried to scaffold by summarizing the chapters for the first half of the year, giving them notes, and us reading through them together, deciding what was important information, highlighting, color-coding, taking notes based on that and then having them generate questions they deemed important for our test. I started using the textbook half-way through the year - reading together, discussing, deciding as a class what was important, taking notes in outline format.  Are you asleep now? WAKE UP! That's my struggle...I felt so worried about my kids not being prepared to handle reading the textbook and taking notes on their own (he doesn't provide any notes at all) when they left me that I felt stuck.

Well, I got some great support and advice from my Voxer group. They said I should teach how I want to teach, not to support someone else's teaching. This, my friends, was so freeing to me. To have others, who I know are excellent teachers and who care so much about their students, say that what another teacher does is not my burden to carry.

So, this year in social studies, I have embarked on a year of inquiry. Our first dive into the inquiry waters has been with the topic of exploration. My kiddos generated about 75 questions to lead our discovery. After coming up with as many questions as possible, students worked in pairs to determine whether or not the questions were relevant. We then learned the difference between open-ended and closed-ended questions, the advantages and disadvantages of each, and how to change one from one type to the other. Students collaborated and labeled their questions as either open or closed. Then they worked in small groups to categorize and prioritize their questions. Finally, students began researching to discover answers to their questions. After completing their research, students generated possible ways to portray they learning in a product. They voted on the choices, which was how the groups were decided. In each class we ended up with three different groups/products: skits - which we'll video, diorama/display, interactive map, and a song - which we'll video as well.
We went over the two rubrics I'm using to grade them - based on collaboration/team-work and presentation. Students then planned their project out - each step that needs to happen, supplies needed, who is responsible for what, and dates for each item to be completed in order to be ready to present on September 15th.

My group that is making the interactive map is making the leap into some new technology that they have not been exposed to before. I have given them the choice of two different platforms for their map. The first is Thinglink, which I used to create an interactive image for Open House that shares information about what will be happening in fourth grade throughout the year. The second possibility is Microsoft's Sway. This is new to me, but it's marketed as a venue for digital storytelling. In both platforms you can pull in pictures, video, audio, type your own text, etc. My students are working right now on curating the images they want to use - a map for the main image and additional images to be the link for audio and video information of their research that they're recording. They are having a great time exploring both options. I'm not sure yet which one they'll decide on, but I will put a follow-up post when it's complete.

Below is my sample Thinglink piece from the beginning of the year. It won't show the interactive part here, but there is a link for each image, and when you click on it, it displays a video or text about something that's happening during the year, or at least that's how it was. (For some reason, I can't get my links to show up on Thinglink anymore. I'll have to figure out what happened there.)



Here's an example I made in Sway.

Endangered Animals


After using both, I can see advantages and disadvantages to both platforms. I think for my students though, in wanting their map to be the background image and the interactive pieces to be layered on top, I think Thinglink may be more of what they envisioned. We'll see.

Have you created an interactive piece? What platform did you use?

Story Elements and Theme

We are departmentalized beginning in fourth grade, so each of us teaches our own homeroom reading - except in the beginning of the year. Because I am the fourth grade language arts teacher, I cover the summer reading in this class, and when we're done, the other homeroom teacher will take over for her kiddos. So, today I wanted to share what we've covered the first two weeks of school.

I had my incoming fourth graders read Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo as one of their required books over the summer. I don't require specific books or even genres throughout the year, but by having everyone read the same book, this allows me to teach story elements easily because we can use the events and characters of one book that everyone already knows.

We began by discussing characters in the story. My kiddos named the characters and gave descriptions which included both internal and external traits.

After discussing the characters in the story, we defined internal vs external conflict. We then went through each character and gave examples of each type of conflict for our main characters.

We discussed setting, defined it and then the kiddos gave their ideas of setting from the story.

From there we focused on plot - looking at the events that take place in the story and creating a plot diagram. This was new for them and they really caught on quickly.

Following the plot discussion, we focused topics the author develops in the story. A few that the students came up with were loneliness, friendship, family and love.

During our second week of school, we defined and discussed what a theme is in a story and how the students can use events in the story to show support for these themes in the story. I wanted the students to move from a general topic they think is in the story to develop the idea into a theme. We focused on the topic of friendship.

My read aloud for the second week was You and Me by Susan Verde.  After reading the book, the students took the topic of friendship and generated a theme statement: You can find friendship in unexpected places and at unexpected times.

We then discussed what it means to have a friend, how do you make friends, how do you keep friends, and what makes a good friend. Finally, students created "Friend Wanted" ads where they stated reasons to support the statement: I make a good friend because...

Here are a few:

How do you teach your students about topics and theme in reading?

Monday Made It! - August 10th

It's that time again. I'm a little late to the party today because I had to go back to school today for inservice all day. I'm tired...but I wanted to participate in Tara's 4th Grade Frolics fun Monday Made It. Today my Made It is my classroom.

My door...

My Room..

This is my YA bookshelf.

It's hard to see, but there are books all along the right side of the picture and along one shelf under the cabinets at the far end.

Homework board straight ahead, bulletin board on the right is for students to post their goals. The blue and green baskets are book baskets for my students. Underneath the book baskets are cubbies for the other 4th grade homeroom. To the left is a blank are where I'm going to post our read aloud books as we complete them. Finally, the pink and white stripe table has writing supplies.

This has a test calendar on the left window and birthday displays on the right window. Along the counter are class journals, shake-it-up vocabulary, book cards, and story starters.

I'm off to bed now:) What did you make this week?

Monday Made It! - August 3rd

It's that time again! I'm linking up with Tara from Fourth Grade Frolics for Monday Made It. First I have to give a shout out to Tara because she is definitely the reason I've been somewhat productive this summer! Yay!

On to the Made Its...

My first Monday Made It! is from looking at Alison's Made It from Rockin' and Lovin' Learning last week. Click here to see her Monday Made It from last week in case you missed. Click here to go to Polka Dots and Pal and get your own Pal. After reading Alison's post, I just knew I had to head over and make my own pal. Here she is...

My second Monday Made It was also followed from last weeks' Monday Made It. I saw this fabulous tutorial from Keeping Up with Mrs. Harris to make a desktop calendar for the computer. So FABULOUS! She has a great tutorial that makes this super easy to do. I purchased the calendar from the 3 AM Teacher, but you could make your own. I decided hers was too cute, and so I was able to make this lickity split! Now I can see everything I need to at a glance when I'm on my computer. Yay!

My third Monday Made It is a quick book trailer for Circus Mirandus to use next year. I try and do lots and lots of book talks to get my kiddos excited about reading and book trailers are one way to do that. 

What did you make this week?