Seed Topics and Hooks

Happy Monday!

We usually have our Monday Literacy time blocked off for teaching writing and writing skills, and I wanted to share what we did today!

We are starting a personal narrative unit, and I wanted to show them how to really zoom in and narrow their topic so they would have an effective story.

Enter-an anchor chart!

We talked about how you can start with a big topic, and keep narrowing it down until you are talking about a specific moment.

They then did this awesome sort so they could see how the topics kept zooming in.

After they did the sort and we talked about narrowing a little more, I had them complete the organizer again, but this time choosing their own topics-one of which they would eventually pick to write their narrative on.

Once we had shared a few of their topics, I showed them how they could really 'hook' their reader with a great intro!

(On a side note, when I typed in writing leads to the Pinterest search bar, one of my older charts popped up-that's so cool!)

We did this one together, and I picked my seed story of fireworks on the hill to show them how they could write different intros for one story.

After we had talked about different intros, I had them go back and pick one of their seed stories to start and write three different intros with it.

We didn't quite have enough time for them to write their leads three different ways, but at least it got them thinking about how to make their leads interesting!

We'll continue to work on this, and will be working in show, not tell and figurative language into our writing as well. We just have to start our stories!

Smiles and Sunshine,
Kaitlyn