For our third, and final short story unit, we're focusing on dialogue. Nothing brings a character to life like listening to what they say, and nothing makes a story flow like engaging dialogue tags. Let's avoid the "he said, she said" game and move our writing forward towards excellence. Likewise, nothing kills a story like poorly-punctuated dialogue and bland dialogue tags.
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Lesson PlansMonday 5/11/2020:
Dialogue Rule Reminders and Forms "Quiz" During today's lesson, we're going to work on the exact mechanics of punctuating dialogue. It's just the, "you have to know these facts," lesson before we practice applying the rules to actual dialogue. It shouldn't take long, just a quick Slides presentation sharing the information, and then a quick Forms assignment to ensure students read the Slides and learned the dialogue rules.
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Tuesday 5/12/2020:
Dialogue Punctuation Practice Today, we'll take the rules we learned yesterday and apply them to actual dialogue. Using the form to the right, students will read dialogue, and work through a series of scaffolded activities to learn how the rules learned yesterday fit into actual dialogue you might read in an actual story.
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Wednesday & Thursday 5/13/2020, & 5/14/2020:
Intentional Dialogue Tags to Tell the Story Appropriately-punctuated dialogue is just the first step towards effectively incorporating dialogue into a story. Effective dialogue tags are the next step. In this lesson, we'll look at a Slides presentation about how to write effective dialogue tags, and then use another Form to submit some effective dialogue tags of our own. I've allowed two days for this lesson because it will take some time and effort to graduate out of the, "he said," "she said," dialogue tags that students are used to writing.
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Friday 5/15/2020:
Plot Structure Chart Reminders and Reasoning I cannot say enough, or spend enough time and lessons on teaching students that effective stories come down to a delicate balance of a well-chosen conflict, and an intentional climax. These two elements of the plot structure chart are imperative to get right for a story to work well. Imagine what the Lord of the Rings would have been like if we didn't know why Frodo was carrying the ring to Mordor. Imagine if Voldemort was only introduced in book seven of Harry Potter. Imagine if we didn't realize that Rocky Balboa was training to be a boxing champion, or if Mickey hadn't died in the beginning of Rocky III.
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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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Day 1Monday, 5/18/2020
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Day 2-5Tuesday, 5/19/2020 -
Friday, 5/22/2020 |
Today, students will complete their plot structure chart graphic organizer for their second story, remembering to include planned elements of suspense and dramatic irony.
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These four days are devoted to writing! I STRONGLY recommend spending about 40 minutes each day writing. You will not be able to write an entire story during home base upon your return in April.
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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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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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Lesson Plans |
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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 read their own stories and apply the "editing checklist" linked to the right.
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On these two days, students will self evaluate their stories (only because we're all at home, and there is no way to peer review our stories together.
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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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