Writing, Writing, Writing!

We have been working extremely hard on writing these past few months, and I am finally seeing progress! At first my students would totally miss the point of mini-lessons. I would work on them with prewriting and set them to independent work...and guess what they didn't do? Pre-write! I did a mini-lesson on paragraphing and....they'd write everything in one blob without even indenting. Maybe it was the lectures, maybe it was the parent teacher conferences, maybe it was the report cards, or maybe my little third graders have finally matured. Either way, I am extremely proud of how hard they have been working and the progress I am seeing. They are actually believing in themselves and starting to realize that they can do better! Now it's refining details....like describing things that are important. For example, they finally started describing...but they'd talk about the girl's hair color when it had nothing to do with the problem in the story. Now they're talking about quivering lips, shaking knees, and tear-stained cheeks because of the furrowed eyebrow, teeth-clenching bully!
Other than good old-fashioned practice and using mentor texts as examples, here are some resources I have been using:

Snip! Snap! What's That?

Short, humorous fiction book that is great for teaching onomatopoeia!

I use this cool onomatopoeia art poster to help kids remember different words to use.

Onomatopoeia Poster with Words

Mrs. Gilchrist's Author's Purpose Charts

OREO Persuasive Writing Chart

This is working aaaaamazingly!!! My students are now writing 5 paragraph persuasive essays! It's been hard getting them to come up with reasons, but once they do, the examples flow!

Writing Workshop PowerPoint (click any image to view)

I am now going to give this to parents on Back to School Night!

It includes kid-friendly (but sophisticated) examples of introductions...

descriptions...

...and closings from popular books...

...as well as samples of student writing. They're definitely a little above where I expect my students to be, but it's nice to be able to give them something to aim for.

Check out other resources on my Wonderful Writing Pinterest Board!

...and don't forget to enter my giveaway!

Giveaway Goodies!!

Don't forget, you have a few more days to enter the giveaway! 

http://alysiabattista.blogspot.com/2012/03/busy-bee-birthday-bash.html

The True Story of the Three Little Pigs

This week's Journeys reading story, Dogzilla, had a journal prompt that asked the kids to rewrite the story from the dog's point of view. They had no idea what that meant until I pulled out an oldie but a goodie...

The Three Little Pigs - wolf style! John Scieszka wrote The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. Albert Wolf tries persuade the jury that he should be freed from jail because the reason he ate the pigs was a big misunderstanding... so this story was also fabulous because we're working on persuasive writing and cause/effect! While it's humorous non-fiction, he prefers to call it a fractured fairytale.

My students thought it was pretty funny, and immediately knew how they would turn Dogzilla into a first-person narrative from the dog's point of view.

Other books of the same type include:

The Three Pigs

and 

Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig

For more activities for The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, click here or here.

For more Journeys posts, click here.

Dogzilla

This week's reading story is called Dogzilla. 

It's a humorous revision of Godzilla, but with a dog and mice as its main characters. Author and illustrator Dav Pilkey's site gave us more information about his inspiration for writing. He likes to take pictures of his pets, then cut and glue them to backgrounds he has painted. They become the pages of his books! He even posted some of the pages of this book on his website!

He also has some fun animal puzzles for you to do!

Check out the Eduplace website for Dogzilla here.

For other Journeys posts, click here.

In Like A Lion and Out Like a Lamb: Spring Similes and March Metaphors

Well, not so much this year in NJ! We had an extremely calm winter (that has felt like spring at times) with only 2 days of snow where I live! We're finishing up our weather chapter in science, so I thought the theme would make the perfect bulletin board. We've also been focusing on using figurative language (especially similes and metaphors) in writing. This book is great for introducing personification too!

My March bulletin board is going to showcase our writing. Students will be drawing literal and figurative meanings of common similes and metaphors. 

Download my list of March Metaphors and Spring Similes by clicking here! 

For some lion and lamb activities, click here or on the picture.

Click the maze to download it!

Make these crafts!