Writers write. And that’s exactly what our class has been busy doing. On Thursday we celebrated the incredible hard work these students have been putting forth. To see a story go through all the phases of the writing process and be proud of the final product is quite the feat! I can tell how proud my students were by the smiles on their faces and their eagerness to see their stories published into a book and share them with others. Bravo!

Our librarian, Mrs. Allen, is delighted to place our books in the school library temporarily and is eager to show them to our visiting author who comes next Friday. Her name is Andrea Beck. A future blog post will be written about her visit.

Our celebration of writing happened on Thursday complete with a drink and a snack. Our books can go home this Easter weekend to be shared with family (with the promise to bring them back on Tuesday to be placed in the library).

Cheers!

Mrs. Sullivan

Students are gearing up to put all their hard work and drafting skills into their good copy. We will be turning our stories into books and can’t wait to share our finished pieces with you!

Students have been learning over the past several weeks how to embed meaningful dialogue, setting details, step-by-step details, double-endings (physical and emotional as Jack Gantos would suggest), colourful vocabulary, different types of narrative (1st person versus 3rd person), leads, conclusions, paragraphing…phew! It’s endless.

The students are so creative and love to share their work with others. Some of the stories are about going to camp, entering a race, losing a Roll up the Rim tab, friendship, auditioning for a school, sleepovers, water slide disasters, etc. They are all quite diverse.

Today we spent time learning how to edit with a partner and were asked to listen very carefully as to where the student did well and what they could improve upon. We also worked on our title pages.

Stay tuned for the finished product celebration. Write on!

In Writing Workshop, we are learning to generate ideas for writing realistic fiction.

What is realistic fiction?

Realistic fiction is a genre consisting of stories that could have actually occurred to people or animals in a believable setting. These stories resemble real life, and fictional characters within these stories react similarly to real people.

We have learned to:

• reread older entries in our notebook, mining for possible ideas
• think about stories we wish existed in the world and write about them
• draw a map of our house and let this reveal ideas for a story

When writing, it is great to learn from the pros! Recently, we’ve been learning different ways to gather ideas for writing realistic fiction. Over the last few days, we’ve had Jack Gantos as our teacher of writing. He’s the author of the Rotten Ralph series, Joey Pigza series, Jack Henry series, and other books, too!

When working abroad, I had the pleasure of meeting Jack Gantos and listened to him share his tips and strategies when writing. I was more than happy to share his presentation with the class recently Writing can be a daunting task, especially when staring at hundreds of blank pages in our notebooks. We learned that just writing 10 minutes a day can be a great start to building a story. Jack showed us his Grade 5 writer’s notebook, which he shows in the picture above. He writes all of his books in his notebook first and he’s kept all of his notebooks from when he was a child. Pretty neat!

To add to our repertoire of generating ideas for fictional writing, we’re taking Jack’s advice and drawing a map of our house and finding stories that hide within our house–either in our bedroom, in the kitchen, backyard, wherever! We might dismiss the ‘everyday’ things that happen to us and overlook them as potential stories to nurture and develop. Most of Jack’s stories that he writes about come from things that happen to him in his own life.

In this writing unit, we hope to use stories from our own lives to inspire and create fictional characters and events.

Stay tuned for more about our realistic fiction writing adventures!

As part of our paragraph writing practice, we took a close look at some paragraphs students had written already and then evaluated their responses in 2 ways:

1. How well the student answered the question, including organization of their thoughts
2. Conventions (grammar, punctuation, capitalization)

It helps to get practice knowing what a level 4 sounds like, compared to a level 3, and so on. For the most part, we all agreed on the levels we assigned to each answer.

Have a look at us in action!

To REVISE means to see again. The prefix re- means again and vise means to see such as in the words vision, visor, visionary.

As we prepare to publish our narratives, we took some time today to read our narratives to a partner. The partner was asked to listen carefully and afterwards offer 2 specific compliments (e.g., I really liked the way you wrote your lead. It was catchy and I could picture what you were saying), and 1 suggestion for a revision (e.g., perhaps add more detail to that paragraph).

Reading our stories in an expressive, storyteller way is helpful to bring our ideas to life, too! Great job everyone for your hard work. It is so important to have ‘fresh eyes’ looking at your work.

There are so many layers to writing that we are learning about this year such as:

• strategies to generate writing ideas
• how to add voice to our writing
• how to craft a lead
• how to craft an ending without saying “The End” or to be continued…
• when do you start a paragraph? What is a paragraph?
• how to add dialogue
• making our word choices more vivid and complex
• how to use published authors as our mentors. What did this author do that I can try?

Most times, good writing just doesn’t happen. You work at it, you revise (making it sound better), and you edit (making it look better), and you do it all over again until you feel it’s ready to be published.

What do you find the most challenging when it comes to writing and the writing process?