When we write, our entire lives are like a stretch of mountains and we can choose where to dwell.
Barry Lane, After THE END, Mentor Texts pp. 77
How to “Slow down time in writing”
As teachers, we want to think about how we can get students to develop content in their stories. This is what we mean by “slow down time in writing.” Developing content is how we get students to tell their stories- without bouncing around and giving us a “bed to bed” story. Students tend to have a hard time staying focused on one small moment or event. By slowing down the time, we are hoping to give students the ability to tell their story with as much detail and description as they can. Slowing down the time teaches students to expand upon their writing to make it more rich and less broad. As Dorfman and Cappelli say, the goal for the students is to let their “reader feel like he or she is in the moment with you.” But how do we get students to do this?
Mentor texts are a great approach to giving students ideas on how to stretch out a moment in their life to expand it into a personal narrative. There are many great mentor texts out there to help students learn to write their stories. A few of my favorites and some I am working with in graduate school right now are; Happy Like Soccer by Maribeth Boeltz, Shortcut by David Crews and Rollercoaster by Marla Frazee. Each of these books take a specific moment in time and enrich the moment to full capacity by including emotions, details, dialogue, and senses. Another way we can help students is by giving them the magnifying glass analogy. In Dorfman and Cappelli’s work, they compare focusing on one specific moment to write a story about to a magnifying glass. They say that writers “take moments in time and put them under a magnifying lens, examining every small detail for it’s worth, it’s importance to the whole.” I think this is a great method to get kids thinking about how they can narrow in their approach to their topic and focus on really making that one moment something special.
Tips and Strategies to help writers focus on their topic:
- Dipping into dialogue
- Descriptions: Digging Deeper
- Appealing to the senses
- Using Anecdotes to Reveal Details
- Focusing on a moment (Small moment stories!!!)
Your Turn Lesson: Using Illustrations to Add Details
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o7zz6U9McJ_qXb6AMMVnV4vU_u-ummK7xHQHmySx70M/edit?usp=sharing
Six Word Memoir
Six word memoirs are found to be a very effective method of writing instruction to use in the classroom to get students interested in beginning writing. This strategy explicitly helps students learn how to chose their words carefully- because they can only use just six words. By using only these six words, students can learn to pay close attention to the words they are using and creating strong words that flow together to complete their short thought.
Here is a six word memoir about my opinion on the last 3 months of graduate school:
“It will all be worth it” ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ “It will all be over soon.”
Revising Leads and Growing the Narrative
According to Dorfman and Cappelli, the lead- the beginning lines of the story are critical. The lead is how you being a writing piece and can set the tone for the entire piece. Funny enough, one of the best ways to begin your lead is by talking about the weather. Everyone always jokes by talking about the weather, but describing the weather in the beginning of a story is a great way to lead your readers through the first sentence, paragraph, page or chapter. Here are a few examples from Mentor Text for coming up with a great lead:
- Onomatopoeia
- Snapshot setting
- Snapshot character
- Foreshadowing
- Short, Choppy Statement
- Action
- Dialogue
- Weather
- Quote and many more!
Building a narrative takes time- it isn’t something that can be done in one day of writing. And it may take several lessons or mini lessons to help students understand how to build their writing over time. We have to let our students understand that writing in a process in which you begin by thinking of a topic, narrowing in on that topic, gathering details, and then composing them with a beginning, middle and end. This is why mentor texts and teacher modeling is so important because it shows students how to write their stories in a way that helps the readers to visualize and understand their story better. The whole purpose of slowing down the writing is to show students that they can take a small moment, and then expand on it to create a whole narrative with a beginning, middle and end.
I like the way that Caulkin describes a lead. She says that using the word lead might actually be misleading and that better words to use would be grab, yank or pull. This is because you want the beginning of your writing to be a hook- something that will pull the reader in close and keep them interested in what’s coming next. We want students to really take their time and expand on their leads to make them as strong as possible. An example of a powerful lead can be found in Boeltz’s Happy Like Soccer. Boeltz begins her story with comparing and contrasting two emotions- that nothing makes her happier than soccer but also nothing makes her sad like soccer. This is a great lead because this makes the reader want to know more about Sierra’s contrasting feelings and more about her life story.
Resources
Craft Moves: Lesson Sets for Teaching Writing with Mentor Texts by Stacey Shubitz. © 2016 Stenhouse Publishers.
Calkins, L. M. (2006). A guide to the writing workshop, grades 3-5.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann
Saunders, J. M., & Smith, E. E. (2014). Every word is on trial six-word memoirs in the classroom. The Reading Teacher, 67(8), 600–605.
Ms. Wild's Thoughts 