We are learning to be wide awake as writers and pay attention to what amazing stories we have to tell from our own lives. Our first unit is writing a personal narrative which is a true story about something that happened in our lives.

Students have been gathering ideas in their notebooks and finally we have chosen the one idea we will nurture and develop over the next short while. We will learn to write a lead, add juicy details, maybe add some dialogue, and learn how to make a conclusion to our story. 

Some ideas students have thought of include:

• searching for seashells at the beach
• going on a rollercoaster for the first time
• visiting Grandma and Grandpa’s boat
• going bowling and scoring my highest goal ever

There are so many wonderful stories we can tell from our own own lives. We can’t wait to publish them! Stay tuned. 

In the pictures below, we are story-telling. We are using elaboration and asking questions of our partner to tell us more about the event in our life that we are writing about. 

We’ve been writing poetry the last few weeks and are nearing the end of our unit. Our focus has been on free-verse poems which we love because there are NO rules!

We’ve been learning about how to find poems that hide all around us, living wide awake as writers. We learned that we need to pay close attention to our lives and see, feel, touch, smell, and listen closely.

Poems sometimes whisper to us and other times they yell. Poems live in our houses, in our classroom, on the school yard, at the beach, in our cottage, at a restaurant, in a boat…EVERYWHERE!

Here’s some of the strategies we’ve added to our poetry ‘toolbox’:

• Looking at the world with fresh eyes
• listening for line breaks
• using juicy, precise words
• Using show, don’t tell
• similes, metaphors
• alliteration
• onomatopoeia
• personification

We are creating our poetry anthologies through Google Slides and are handing in our very best 6-8 poems. In class today, our focus was on revising our poems–looking at them again with a partner. We read some advice from famous poets and came to understand that revision is an important piece of the writing process, even for poetry!