A large part of the 5th grade experience is learning to tell story. Our favorite ongoing exploration of our stories is creating the compiled visual depiction in our scrapbooks. Each page is kicked off with a parent or family interview, a hunt for the right photos, and some writing. Putting the pages together is a highlight of Fridays.
We are also working to tell our story through writing memoirs. The writing project began by brainstorming all the different types of watermelon topics, to find the seed stories in our lives. After reading and listening to memoirs by Roald Dahl, Jean Craighead George, John Scieszka, and Patricia Polacco, we determined that memoirs often include dialogue, show emotional reactions, and have a lesson. We workshopped our stories by asking our partners to reenact the emotions heard in the writing; by watching the actions closely, we added descriptive language to paint imagery around our emotional experiences.
Using our own novels as mentors, we've collected examples of dialogue, and then looked closely at these models to create our own meaning behind punctuating dialogue.
We are excited to share our memoirs and scrapbooks with a meaningful audience.
No comments:
Post a Comment