One small part of our classroom library.
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It's time to do our part to advance the base of literature available for future readers to enjoy! It's one thing to read and understand amazing stories; it's another thing entirely to create an amazing story.
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Short Stories: Planning
Our first creative writing mini-unit will center around traditional, short stories. Students will use a plot structure chart, and some mrkarpie.com exclusive, original tools to create an amazing 3-5 page story. This first week is dedicated entirely to developing the skills necessary to produce a well-written story. We'll look at conflict, "showing" vs. "telling," characterization, setting, and imagery while simultaneously refining our story ideas through daily, individualized teacher feedback.
Lesson Plans |
Materials |
Monday, 1/6/2020 - Structured Conflict Selection
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The biggest mistake that students make when writing a short story is to select a conflict that is too big to reasonably solve in 3-5 pages. They always want to write epic battles between good and evil, or long romances that cover everything from meeting as 8th-grade sweethearts through 28 year old honeymooners. They want to write about the 50 years of horror that caused a haunted house to be infamous. Today, we'll start with a Peardeck-enhanced slideshow that will offer writing samples that are appropriately developed, versus writing samples that are underdeveloped, and also conflict options that are too big, too small, and just "write." Hahaha. Writing pun intended. Afterwards, students will be asked to submit an idea for a conflict they want to solve during their short story.
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Tuesday, 1/7/2020 - "Showing" vs. "Telling" Practice
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The second biggest mistake students make when writing stories is that they tend to "tell" the audience about what's happening instead of "showing" it. For example "Winston was the least popular kid in class." [telling] "As Winston walked into the cafeteria, carrying the same Disney-themed backpack from when he was a kid, all the students went silent, and stared intently at their lunches, hooking any available seats at their tables and pulling them closer in hopes that Winston wouldn't sit down." [showing] Today, we'll do a series of sorting activities in which students will categorize descriptions as "showing" or "telling." Afterwards, we'll come together to write our own examples of "showing" and "telling" writing in response to a series of creative-writing prompts.
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Creative Writing Prompts
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Wednesday, 1/8/2019 - Characterization Stations
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Students always want to create perfect characters, and just "tell" you about them. This lesson is strategically placed after yesterday's practice, because effective characterization requires competent "showing" abilities. Today's lesson will use familiar images from our Unconscious Bias unit, but this time, we'll write descriptions of the characters using multiple forms of characterization. Each station will have a character's image taped there, and students will select a type of characterization, and then write an appropriate description before moving on to the next station. We'll pause several times during class too look at examples and non-examples that our classmates compiled.
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Thursday, 1/9/2019 - All about 'Dat Dialogue
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Dialogue is the next logical step to learn after characterization. So many of the ways we learn about characters depends upon what they say, what others say to them, or what others say about them. The two biggest hiccups students face with dialogue are:
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Dialogue Building Blocks
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Friday, 1/10/2019 - Intentional use of Imagery
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Our five senses are the only way that we ever interact with the world around us. Whether it's the smell of crisp bacon in the morning, or the warmth of a snuggly baby falling asleep on your shoulder, everything that we do involves seeing, hearing tasting, touching, and smelling. (At this time of year, all too often we are acutely aware of the "feel" of our belts tightly holding in those extra holiday pounds we've gained.) With the conflict, climax, and setting all pretty well hammered out at this point, we'll start class with a short imagery review, and then students will brainstorm two examples of imagery appropriate to their story for each of the five senses. Then, they'll use a fresh, beautiful plot structure chart to plan out the general outline of their story.
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Imagery Informational Slides
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Short Stories Writing Project
Now that we've learned how to produce great writing, and we've refined our story ideas together to ensure well-written short stories, it's time to write! This week will be comprised of structure writing days, with a self-assessment protocol so that both teachers and students can track our progress towards finishing our amazing, short stories by Friday.
Story DescriptionStudents will organize and write a 3-5 page short story that effectively incorporates multiple elements of literature. They can choose any topic they want, whether it's invading aliens or the thrill of a first kiss. The trick will be to advance the action at a step-by-step pace, and to create amazing, high-quality prose.
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Success SkillsIntentionally organize and write a narrative text.
[W8.3a, W8.3b, W8.3c, W8.3d, W8.3e]
Produce and revise clear writing that is free of errors.
[W8.4, W8.5, W8.6]
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Story Writing Timeline
Day 1Monday, 1/13/2020
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Day 2-3Tuesday, 1/14/2020 &
Wednesday, 1/15/2020 |
Day 4Thursday, 1/16/2020
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Day 5Friday, 1/17/2020
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Today, students are expected to write their exposition and to establish their conflict. By the end of today, their readers should know what problem will occur in the story, where it will happen, and should know something about the characters that are going to work to solve the conflict.
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These two days are all about that rising action! These are the days that produce the "meat" of the story. Students will write ferociously to capture events and choices that propel the action forward, situations that reveal information about their characters, and otherwise use the elements we studied last week to build up to their climax.
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Climax Day! Today, students' conflicts should come to a head. Their characters should come together to finally confront the main conflict of the story, whether that conflict involves outrunning to last defender on the basketball court to score the game-winning layup, or finally, abashedly asking out the girl our main character has had a crush on throughout the whole story.
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For the final day of story writing, students will "wrap up all the lose ends" of their story into a nice conclusion (or maybe an intentional cliffhanger) Ideally, they'll leave a few minutes to proofread, edit, and improve their writing before turning it in!
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*Each day will end with a quick, three minute progress tracking checklist activity to ensure that students are all on the same page (and day) and making adequate progress towards their goal.
Story Materials
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Plot Structure Chart Graphic OrganizerDownload a copy of this plot structure chart (you probably know it as "the witches hat" if you're under fifteen years old) to organize a creative story. Don't forget, when writing a story, the plot moves forward step by step, not by giant leaps.
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Story Assignment Page with OutlineThis is an incredibly basic template created mostly for the purposes of creating a Google Classroom assignment. The top of the story page has a few reminders about the skills and expectations of the short story unit, but really, it's an intentionally blank canvas upon which students can paint with words!
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Story Checklist and Progress MonitoringProgress monitoring has many purposes. At this point in the year, the hope is that students will be able to monitor their own progress, and reflect upon the quality of their own writing. This tool includes both what should be done and how it should be done with an all-important evidence-based component, and a side dish of student-teacher conferencing.
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Short Story RubricTo maintain the integrity of our writing grades and data, I created a new version of the NYS 4-point rubric that is more conducive to assessing the quality of a short story. While the point values are the same, and there is still the general expectation that level three is "at grade level" and level four is "above," everything else has been modified to be short-story specific.
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Writing Tools PageThe goal of every successful ELA classroom is to help students develop into the best possible writers that they can become. The tools below are what we use in my classroom to help students on the road to above grade level writing and beyond.
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Anysia and Jazmyn take a break from writing their amazing stories to pose for this picture.
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Reader's / Writer's Workshop
After all the hard work and dedication that students put into their stories, it seemed a shame to simply grade them on Google Classroom, go over a few exemplars of each grade point, and call it a day. Besides, the point of short stories isn't really to evaluate them, it's to ENJOY READING THEM. This week, we'll start by reading a selection of student-created stories together to model how our readers workshop will function, and how to use a new and unfamiliar tool which could easily go wrong. Then, for the next few days, students will spend some time reading and responding to each other's stories.
Tuesday, 1/21/2020 Peer Editing
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There are a few, very-easy mistakes that students make over and over again that cause them to lost points on the "command of conventions" portion of our rubric. Sometimes, their basic editing mistakes even make the rest of their writing so difficult to understand that the loss of points spirals into other portions of the rubric. (It's difficult to write effective dialogue without effective punctuation. Even the best "showing" descriptions are virtually unintelligible when students don't use a single punctuation mark in an entire page of writing.) Today, students will first read their own stories and apply the "editing checklist" linked to the right. More importantly students will read and edit the stories of two other students, hoping to avoid any points lost for simple, editing mistakes.
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Wednesday, 1/22/2020 Workshop Modelling
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All of our work to date has been viewed through a microscopic lens, and based in the unerringly accurate world of evidence-based claims. There has been an obvious right and wrong. With short stories, and creative writing in general, the writing is intended to entertain, so looking at it factually, critically, and for evaluation matters less than just enjoying the experience of reading. Today, we'll model how to read, "evaluate," and use our Workshop Form appropriately. We'll also highlight a bunch of our students' amazing stories.
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Thursday, 1/23/2020 & Friday, 1/24/2020 Writer's Workshop
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Students will spend the entirety of today's class in silence. They'll be nestled deeply in the tomes of their classmate's writing. They'll respond to the writing using the methods we modelled and practiced yesterday.
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