Literacy is a struggle in America today, it is no secret. We place relatively low in comparison to other developed nations around the world when it comes to our student's literacy rates. As a teacher, one of the most difficult areas of teaching to master is writing. Some teachers are excellent writers and their students love their sample stories, but continually struggle with helping students develop the same "expectation". Many a colleague of mine have thrown their hands up in frustration reading through a writing journal selection of student work on a recent piece, confused, upset, and irritated that students still didn't "get" it. The temptation always looms to fix the mistakes or "improve" through additions, but we all know as educators that this leads to little, if any, internalized improvement of behalf of the student.
I ran into this very same problem, too. Then, I came across two excellent resources one summer, referred to me by an educator whom I consider to be a master in teaching writing, and consequently the second grade teacher who hooked me on writing as well. The first was Teaching for Deep Understanding, an indespensible resource for understanding the reading-writing connection and its implementations in the classroom, and The Most Wonderful Writing Lessons Ever, a step-by-step guide to building mastery in writing skills for children at any level.
As a result of these two books, I developed an approach to writing that showed significant, lasting improvement among all students in my classes. First, writing is a subject that is often shoved aside in the elementary classroom, placed on the back burner of formal instruction. many teachers believe students are always writing, so they count that toward their hours. Writing requires meticulous, step-by-step learning and instruction, and can be very tedious and time consuming.
I begin each year in my classroom with an activity. I give a small group of students a brown paper bag full of laminated words. What students do not know is that each bag actually contains one page from a very familiar children's fairy tale, which I have made copies of, laminated, and cut into individual words. All the bags contain a total of 4 sentences. The challenge for students is to take their words and create a story that makes sense, and I tell them in the end they should have four complete sentences.
After completing this, I then pull out a large chart that explains how a story is created. We begin with words, and use those words to build sentences, and then combine those sentences in an appropriate manner that lets the story flow and make sense, and ultimately we create pages, chapters and whole books. I then begin to analyze the chart with what students have in front of them. First words, students are asked what words they used to help build their sentences. Students always pick nouns, places, or events. This always wonderfully translates over into the basic parts of a story, characters, setting, and plot. Students are amazed to realize that their brains automatically, just from reading, know the parts of a story and how a story needs to be constructed.
It is at this point in the series of lessons that I pull out my three-dimensional story mountain. It is literally a mountain made out of foamboard, and complete with different leveled platforms labeled Exposition, Conflict/Problem, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Resolution. I also have a hiker dressed for adventure, complete with a backpack and fishing pole.
Now that students understand how stories are made from words, I have each student group read aloud their page of the story they have created, and written on a piece of paper. We then begin to place each page into its proper sequence and order in the story. I have created this lesson so that each page corresponds with one part of the story, so that the first page describes the exposition, the second page describes the introduction of the problem and story conflict, etc.
Now that we have a full story composed, I walk my hiker through the story, using various visual cues along the way. The hiker begins his journey by packing all the things he will need for his journey in his backpack, and catches a fish to eat for food. I relate this to the "hook" sentence of the story, where a writer interests, or hooks the reader, in the first sentence of the story and then introduces us to all the information we will need for the story, including the main characters (protagonist and antagonist) and the setting. Then the hiker moves to the conflict or problem. In my mountain, this is a rain cloud that forms over the head of the hiker. I relate this to the story problem after introducing students to types of conflict (person vs. person, self, nature, society) and we make correlations. Then, the hiker moves on to the rising action, where in my mountain he begins to build a tent or shelter to protect himself form the rain. The first is made of straw, the second of twigs, the third of stones and boulders (again showing that often the character tries to solve his problem many times before being successful). In the third step, it begins to rain, and just when it seems all is lost, the hiker reaches the top of the mountain (the climax) where his problem is solved and the conflict is faced. He had his stone boulder shelter and is safe from the rain. As always, we discuss this correlation to our completed story. The falling action in my mountain involved the rain cloud first getting sad and leaving, then the hiker happy and in a field of flowers enjoying the view. The resolution comes as he returns to his home, a prop I have made, and is excited to tell of his adventures and what he learned on the mountain.
This lesson is followed up with a group reading and a pair-share reading where students will complete a graphic organizer story mountain about the different parts of their story to solidify their understanding.
This entire lesson usually takes about a week of 45 minutes class periods to do, but I never rush it as this is the building block of understanding for the rest of the year. As students compose short stories, they use the mountain to walk us through their stories. I purposely have students in the beginning of the year write each part of their story on separate pieces of paper to help them understand the different parts and make sure they have included all the elements of an exciting story.If they do not have six pages, they know they have more work to do.
Another side-tip: Have students skip lines (place an x on every other line as a general rule when writing), that way students and teacher have a place to revise, edit, and make other changes to their stories without having to jamb it into a margin or in between words or sentences. Also, try to use a different color when revising or editing for clarity.
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