Sunday, February 24, 2013

Art Inspired Stories

My students created papier maché alien figures for an art project a few weeks ago. I seized this opportunity to get them to write creative stories featuring their alien as a main character. I gave them minimal guidelines as I could sense a huge amount of excitement. I reminded them that the story should have a problem or be about an adventure. I suggested writing in the first person, putting themselves in the story. Finally I reminded them to include descriptions of the setting (the alien's home planet) and of a main character. This assignment resulted in the quietest hour in my classroom this year! They were clearly inspired. After an hour most of the kids were done with a first draft.

The next day I asked them to read their stories silently. I put up my "Revising" chart and asked them to revise for strong sentences and better vocabulary. For third graders the specific guidelines on the chart provide a concrete way for them to approach this task.

1. Catchy first line and entertaining beginning.
2. No "banned" words (nice, good, bad, great, awesome, stuff, things)
3. Use your senses to describe a setting
4. Erase the words "so" and "then" at the start of a sentence.

In an upper grade class my revising list would look different. I will elaborate on this in a separate entry.

The editing checklist goes up next. Punctuation, grammar, and capitalization are what students work on next. After this step, each student brings me their story and I do a final edit with them before they write out their final draft.

Here are some stories from this assignment:



Aliens
By Jack Foster

Who knew there were aliens?  So one day I was walking down East Avenue when I heard a “Poooph!”  It wasn’t very quiet.  I went down an alleyway.  I was in for a shock!  A seventy-five foot rocket was right in front of me!  A seven foot giant came out of it.  Her name was Cattrisha.  She came from planet A.T.L.L.P.  It stood for aliens that look like people.

She said .  “hheellowwee E Earrtthhlliinnggss. Ddo yyoouu wwaanntt ttoo ssaavvee oouurr ppllaanneett?”

I said, “Yes, yes, yes Yes!!!”  I then got on the spaceship for a forty-two hour ride.  When we got there it was hot and rainy.  “Are we in Hawaii?” I asked.

“No.” she said. “Oh, nnooww iitt iiss ttimme ttoo ssaavvee oouurr ppllaanneett.”

I said “Ok.”

She said, “CCaan I-I  ttaallkk ttoo mmyy ffrreeiinnddss iinn mmyy vvooiiccee? “

“Yes.” I said.
“Y accoddmglo moon crash in hs?”

I understood and said I will stop the moon!  They all said “Yyaayy!”  I asked, “Do you have a repair shop?”  They said yes.  I started working on a huge fan.  I did this so I could blow A.T.L.L.P. away from the moon’s path.

After five hours it was finished.  I called it the blower.  I started it and then Cattrisha said, “Tthheerree iiss nooo ppoowweerr.”

I said, “Oh no.”  I found jumper cables and got in their spaceship and attached it to the sun.  It started and it blew A.T.L.L.P. away.  I had to fly home and I will tell nobody about my adventure.




A Trip to Another Planet
By Lea

An alien named Desireeat59Z was sitting by its lava pool.  He had a long arm with two balls.  One ball was at the right end and one ball was at the left end.  He had a big ball in the middle of the arm and two big eyes, one at the back and one at the front.  Des was from the planet Senoyadio.  Even though he was having a marvelous time at his lava pool, he was also keeping a lookout for one of his enemies.  Desireeat59z’s enemy is To5ven.

Meanwhile on Earth, it was a summer’s Saturday.  I was sitting inside, bored.  I had an idea.  Maybe, I could call my friend!  I called my friend, Joy, and her mom said she could come over.  She brought her big toy rocket over.  We played for a while then got bored.  I suggested we dig through the rocket and see if there was anything spectacular in it.  We looked for about an hour.  Then joy found a big red button.  It said “PRESS”.  We pressed it and we started going into space.  In about four hours we crashed into a red planet.

The red planet had fine homes and lava pools.  It was fresh, but a little burnt.  It was probably lava.  There was a sign outside a golden gate, polished marvelously.  The sign said, “Welcome to Senoyadio!”  The gate was wide open and we walked in.  Joy and I were a little confused about where we were.  We went to a blue house.  The house had a golden gate with red rubies.  There were white curtains and low benches.  We knocked on a circular green door.

The door was opened by an alien that bounced on his body.  He had two big black eyes.  He was splashed with different colors.  I was surprised to hear him speak English.  I asked, ”Where are we?”

The alien answered.  ”Senoyadio!  Isn’t it a beauty?”
I said, “How do we get back to planet Earth? Our rocket crashed.”
He replied, “The only way you can get to earth is destroy one of our enemies, To5vn.”
My friend said, “This is a trick!  Isn’t it?”
He replied, “ Nah, the alien wizard has been trying to get rid of his enemy To5ven, for a long time.”
I said, “Okay, we will help you.”

We went to the edge of Senoyadio and found a big black castle with chains all around it.  It was gloomy with fog all around it.  The giant gate opened.  We went into the castle through big, black creaking gates.  To5ven walked down a hall on a red dirty carpet.  We hid behind ripped curtains.  We were in a room with nothing but darkness.  To5ven spoke in a weird alien language.  Here is what he said.  “Cushinoe fomad sawf cole kiche nef sasholo.”  Neither Joy nor I understood any of it.  Desireeat59z seemed like he did though.

While we were in a dark room we made a plan of how to get rid of To5ven.  Des said, “I’ll make noises at the end of Senoyadio.  Then he will probably come out and probably follow the noise.  You two will be hiding behind some trees.  When he turns around and is close to the edge of Senoyadio, you two will creep up quietly to him and push him off!”

Desireeat59z went to the edge and made weird noises.  To5ven came out and asked, “Shesh nat feenie?”  He was at the very edge when we came out and we pushed him off.  He was lost forever.  The alien wizard came in his little place after we pushed To5ven off Senoyadio.  He said, “You guys get one wish.  What wish may I grant you?”

Joy said, “ We want to go home.”  A rocket appeared.  We climbed in, said goodbye to Desireeat59z, and thanked the alien wizard.  In the backseat of the rocket there was a big red button.   It said “PRESS”.  We pressed it.  We started going up into space.  After another 4 hours, we landed on Earth.

We had the same exact rocket without any dents.  My mom saw us and asked, “Where have you two been?”  We told her we had been in the backyard, but we will always remember Senoyadio.


My Trip to another Solar System
By Sarah

3…2…1…kaboom!  I was on my first space mission.  I was going to paint another solar system.  I was sleeping, eating, and reading for so long that I forgot where I was, but just then there was a huge…Boom!  My body shook, my hair stuck up, and my eyes went big.
“We have just entered another solar system!” shouted the captain.  Maybe space wasn’t the place for me.  I was trembling with fear.  The captain spoke again.  “Here’s a good place to land,” he said.  Then we landed but I was too scared to go out, especially when I saw hundreds of little creatures hopping about.
Just then I saw a sign that said, “Welcome to Planet Eyedot.”  Then I realized why.  All of the little creatures had hundreds of dots and eyes covering them from head to toe.  The most beautiful of all the creatures walked toward me.  I was breathless.  She really wasn’t that scary after all.  She was actually beautiful until she spoke.  She sounded like a sick donkey with a British accent.
“I am Universla, Queen of all the aliens in the solar system Dot,” she said.  All of her eyes fixed on me.  She had 22 of them altogether.  If I had that many eyes, I thought, I could see everything.  I did not say that out loud because I might upset her.
Instead I said, “ I am Sarah, a young earthling.  Would you mind if I painted your solar system?”
“Go ahead.” She said in her funny voice.  “While you are here you can stay at my palace and eat the finest bugs.”
“I’d prefer to eat my own food, but I’ll stay with you,” I said.
  “Come,” she answered.  Then the march began, one foot in front of the other, all the way to the palace.  As we went farther into the palace a queer smell filled the air.  The floor and walls were made of rotted earth.  As we walked on I saw lots of beds that had curtains around them.  They had soft comforters but the mattresses looked hard as stone.
Universla went into one of the chambers and came out wearing a blue green skirt, a purple shirt and one pink shoe with a blue stripe and white dots on it.  She led me to an open patio and I started to paint.  When I was finished I was about to go home when the captain told me the space ship was broken.  All the aliens tried to help but they just made it worse.
Suddenly Universla remembered her flying saucer.  “Quick,” she told the page, “go get my flying saucer.”  So the page did and Universla herself flew us home.  I tried to tell the people of my adventure, but they did not believe it, so it remains a secret.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

The Compare and Contrast Paragraph


Now that my students have a reasonable understanding of writing narratives, I turn my attention to nonfiction writing skills. We are required to teach third graders to organize expository paragraphs in the following ways:

1. Main idea, followed by details;
2. Compare and contrast;
3. Cause and effect;
4. Order of events or sequencing.

For the first half of the year my students had plenty of practice writing paragraphs with a main idea and details. Frequently, after reading a story or chapter, my students wrote a summary using this format. This week I guided my students through some paragraph writing using the “compare and contrast” strategy. Our language arts theme currently is Imagination and the reading selections this past week worked perfectly well for this writing lesson.

Goal: 

Students produce two paragraphs showing how to organize their ideas in compare/contrast paragraphs.

Lesson: 

1. Day 1 - read Mike Venezia’s biography of Pablo Picasso with the whole group. In pairs students list the most interesting facts they learned. Have a whole group discussion of what they learned. On a chart write down 8 to 10 facts that students shared.
2. On day 2 read Mike Venezia’s biography of Diego Rivera and repeat the previous days procedures.
3. Day 3 – display both charts with information on the two artists. Give each student a venn diagram template. Working with a partner students complete the diagram to compare and contrast
Picasso and Rivera.

They are now equipped with information. It’s time to write the paragraphs. I explain to the kids that in the first paragraph they will write how the two artists were similar. I ask for a topic sentence. I listen to every idea that is offered and ask them to choose the one they like best. They picked:

Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera were famous 20th century artists.

I then tell them to focus on the part of the venn diagram where the circles intersect to create 3 to 4 sentences for this paragraph.

For the second paragraph I tell the students we are going to describe how these two artists were different. I start by asking them to suggest a topic sentence. Again I allow everyone who has an idea to share, before asking the class to pick the one they like best. For this paragraph the topic sentence the kids came up with was:

Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera became famous because they were unique.

Next, I told them we would “play a game” to finish the paragraph. I would write a sentence about one artist, then they would write a corresponding sentence about the other artist.
I wrote: Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881.
They copied this sentence down, then wrote about Rivera’s birth.
I wrote a few more sentences with salient information about one artist and the kids quite easily created their own parallel sentences.

After they wrote their paragraphs, I reminded them to write a concluding sentence for the piece.

To finish off this series of lessons I always like to make time to share their writing. This is important to make the effort students put into the activity meaningful, and also to expose the class to diverse ideas and styles.

The lesson was stress-free and fun, but the kids also learned some valuable writing strategies.