"Dance at Grandpa's", by Laura Ingalls Wilder, is a wonderfully illustrated picture book. The book is fairly short and exhibits differences in sentence beginnings. Using this book to help teach students how to write using different beginnings to their sentences is a great place to start.
This mini lesson is appropriate for grades 2-4.
After students have written a writing piece (any type of writing), take a look at this book as a class.
Together with the students, write down all of the sentence beginnings from the book (1st 2-3 words). How many of these are the same? Note the many differences in how the author starts her sentences.
Next, ask students to do this same thing with their own writing sample. If there are sentences with the same beginnings, as them to create new beginnings for these sentences. Even if the sentence has to be completely rewritten, an attempt to make a change should be made. Once complete, start eh exercise over to be sure they haven't recreated a repetitive begninner.
As always, allow students to share their writing pieces and/or the changes that they chose to make to their piece during this exercise. Students often enjoy showing others how they have improved on something they have created.
(Ohio's Academic Content Standard: Literary Text Standard ~ Explain how an author's word choice and use of methods influences the reader, Writing Process Standard ~ Edit to improve sentence fluency, grammar and usage.)
No comments:
Post a Comment