Mr. Light’s Blog

The Oxford Hills sixth grade writing curriculum moves the focus from narrative writing (personal narratives, fiction, etc.) toward writing expository essays.  In this genre, students write about ideas.  Usually these essays are about serious ideas such as qualities of a good friend or my favorite season.

In class we have discussed the steps for writing essays. Except for the first two steps, the order that you do them in isn’t really important.

1. Unless a topic is assigned, you must first choose a topic.  Here are a couple of ways we have practiced.
   • List people, places, or things that are important to you and then list some of the ideas these make you think of.  For example, you may think of your best friend and then ideas about what makes a good friend.
   • Think of an idea that is important to you and choose that as your topic.  For example, you may choose patriotism, animal cruelty, or poverty.
2. The next step is to decide on a thesis.  This is the time to decide what you believe about the topic and write that.  Here are a couple of examples.
   • Adults should take kids seriously.
   • Winter is my favorite season.
   • Sometimes it is OK to lie.
3. What are the reasons or evidence that this is true.?  It is important to come up with several reasons to support your thesis.
4. For each reason it is important to have supporting details and/or examples.
5. Plan an introduction for your essay.  It helps to try several different ways to introduce your essay.  The introduction should contain your thesis statement and often briefly mentions the evidence or reasons that show the thesis is true.  Some start with stories that illustrate the thesis.  Try to plan an introduction that will capture the reader’s interest.
6. Plan a conclusion.  Often this restates the thesis and evidence in a different way.  Sometimes the conclusion speaks to some of the ways that acting on the thesis will make things better.  This is another step where it is helpful to plan a couple of different ways to write this and then choose your favorite.
7. Plan how to transition from one idea to the next.  It is important to have smooth connections between ideas so the essay doesn’t become a list of ideas.
8. Plan a title.  A good title will show what the essay is about while capturing the reader’s interest.
9. Start writing!

Remember that writing an essay should be something you enjoy.  Finding a topic that interests you or that you care a lot about is the key.  Sometimes essays lend themselves to humor.  The book, The Truth about Poop in our classroom library is one example.  David Barry has several collections of funny essays as does David Sedaris.

As a parent, there are several things you can do to help your child become a good essay writer.  Ask your child to bring home their writing so you can read it.  Have your child give evidence for their beliefs.  Perhaps the best thing you can do is to talk about ideas with your child.

This week we have focused our reading and writing on poetry.  We have all enjoyed, “Love That Dog”, the poetic journal of a boy, Jack, who writes,

• I don’t want to
• because boys
• don’t write poetry.
• Girls do.

As he continues to explore poetry with his class, he becomes a poet, finishing his journal with a poem inspired by Walter Dean Myers’ “Love that Boy”

• Love that dog,
• like a bird loves to fly
• I said I love that dog
• like a bird loves to fly
• Love to call him in the morning
• love to call him
• “Hey there, Sky!”

We are all reading lots of poems, sharing our favorites, learning about different poetic forms and tools, writing poems, and sharing our poems.  Hopefully, we will publish some of what we write here in a week!

Send links to some of your favorite poems in your comments!

Mr. Light

P.S.  I apologize for the bullets.  I couldn’t figure out how to make this blog editing tool write with an indent and without skipping a line between every line of the poem.

PPS:  Ask some of these questions:

• What is alliteration?
• What is a simile? A metaphore?
• What’s Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven” about?  Who is Lenore?  Why does the raven keep saying, “Nevermore”? What makes you think that?
• What poems do you like?
• What’s inferring?  What do you mean by “Read between the lines”?

We have started reading Gary Paulson’s Hatchet as a class.  We do this to help students learn how monitoring discussing their reading helps them understand and appreciate what they read.  Students lead these skills in a series of lessons which gradually move students from very structured learning activities to more independent levels.

Students have been divided into small groups.  One group was self-selected by students who want to read the book more quickly than other groups.  After reading a chapter, we reflect on the chapter by responding to some questions about the chapter on “share sheets”.  We also look at the vocabulary in the chapter, reading vocabulary words in context, predicting and then checking the word’s meaning.

We then used the “fishbowl” method to demonstrate how a “book club” works.  This is when one of the small groups sits in the middle of the classroom with the rest of us sitting in a circle around them.  The students in the circle discuss the book with some coaching from me.  They are encouraged to listen carefully to each other and to respond to other’s ideas by asking questions, extending the original thought, citing evidence from the text and suggesting alternative interpretations.

As we move ahead, students will work in small groups and finally independently to work on the vocabulary and complete the “share sheets.”  Instead of continuing with the “fishbowl” model, book clubs will meet with me and have their own discussion of the book.  As time passes, I will move from being an active leader of the discussion group to being an observer and occassional participant.

By writing and talking about their reading, students think more deeply about what they read and become better able to find meaning in what they read.

I encourage you, parents, to talk to your child about the their reading, be it a book, magazine, newspaper, or text.  It is also still fun to read aloud with our kids, even as they become teenagers!

(I don’t often write two blogs in two days, so make sure you read the post I did yesterday about reading, too.)

I am sitting on the hard floor surrounded by piles of papers, notebooks, some opened some closed closed, and I am awestruck.  I just finished reading my students’ recent writing.

We have been focusing on improving our writing by “zooming” into details, helping the reader see, hear, feel, taste, and smell by adding sensory details, and showing what is going on inside our character’s head, maybe by writing the inner dialogue.  I want to share some of the phrases I loved.

“. . . Her fur shines like the sun hitting the water. . . ”

“. . . He came wobbling as fast as he could. . . ”

” . . . My bottom lip was puckering up. . . ”

“. . . All that I heard was the crunch of the leaves. . . ”

“. . .A loud roar that shook the ground . . .”

“. . .My knee slid against the rough tar. . .”

“. . .The water tasted like salt . . .”

and, of course,

“. . .She’s soft as bunny fur. . .”

I am surrounded by kids learning to paint with words!

Book Project Ideas

Whatever project you choose, use evidence to support your ideas.  The project should demonstrate that you used at least 2 reading strategies from the list below:

• Summarizing
• Inferring
• Evaluating
• Visualizing
• Questioning
• Predicting
• Determine Importance
• Connecting

After the name of the project, the strategies that might be incorporated in it are listed in parentheses.  For example, (I, V, Q, P) after the interview indicate that you might use inferring, visualizing, questioning, and predicting to do this project.I am asking each student to complete at least one project on a book they read independently each trimester.  Possible project ideas are described below.

• Interview a character. (I, V, Q, P)  Choose one (or more) important characters to interview.  The interview should show the character’s personality and their reasons for making the decisions they make in the book.  You may choose one of the following formats.
  • Write the interview as a dialogue.
  • Record the interview and make a “podcast”.  If you choose this, write a list of questions before hand.  You can either record both parts using different voices, or you can find someone to ask you the questions you write down before-hand.
  • Videotape the interview.
• Write a Diary or make a Scrapbook (S, I, V, P, C) that one of the main characters may have kept before, during, or after the book’s events.
• If several people have read the same book, write and perform a skit (V, D) illustrating one of the important events in the book.
• Prepare a Book Review or Advertisement (S, I, E, V) for the book.  This can be written, recorded, or videotaped.  If recorded, it can be a podcast.  It should include:
  • A summary of the important parts of the plot. (But don’t give away the ending!)
  • A description of the personality of at least one main character.  Give evidence from the book to support your description!
  • An assessment of the book.  Give reasons and evidence for your rating.
• Draw several pictures (V, D, C) of important scenes from the book.  Include quotes from the book that support the details of your pictures.
• Do a book talk (S. D, I, E, C). Talk to the class (or record for podcast) about your book by
  • Saying a little about the author,
  • Your assessment of the book (with evidence)
  • Describe who the characters are.  Include physical descriptions, how characters are related to each other, and their personalities.
  • Explain enough about the beginning of the story so that everyone will understand what they are about to read.
  • Read an exciting, interesting, or amusing passage from your book. Stop reading at a moment that leaves the audience hanging and add “If you want to know more you’ll have to read the book.” If the book talk is well done almost all the students want to read the book.
• Pretend you are a reporter from the town where the book takes place.  Write a feature article (D, I, V, C) (with a headline), or record a radio news story (for podcast) that tells the story of the book as it might be found on the front page of a newspaper in the town where the story takes place.
• Design a book jacket (I, E, S, V) for the book. Look at an actual book jacket before you attempt this.  Include:
  • A description that shows what the book is about (without giving away the ending).
  • An explanation of what you think is the authors purpose for writing this book.
  • Imagined quotes from reviewers of the book.
  • A brief biography of the author.

I hope you are all doing some reading this summer.  I have read just one book in the last couple of weeks, Pictures of Hollis Woods.  I really liked the book. It is about Hollis Woods, a girl who is in foster care.  She has run away from all her foster families until she ends up with Josie, an elderly woman who shares Hollis’ love of art.  The “pictures” are short descriptions of scenes from earlier in her life when she found a family that she loved.  Read this book if you like stories of how kids work through real-world problems.

Let me know what you are reading

Mr Light

Oops!  I just realized that I didn’t blog this weekend!  Sorry about that.  I’ll give an update about what we are up to in class during the Thanksgiving break.  In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about reading.  One thing I ask my students to do is to read at home every day.  This will help them become better readers and writers.  An article in the New York Times today states that students in middle school, high school, and even college are reading less.  It also talks about the relationship between test scores and the amount of reading kids do.  It seems that reading won’t only help with our reading and writing, but carries over into other subjects, too!Read the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/arts/19nea.html?em&ex=1195621200&en=bc01c3c505ea455e&ei=5087%0A and let me know what you think.  After you read it, enjoy a Thanksgiving meal with friends and family, and remember all that we have to be thankful for, pick up a good book (or magazine, poem, etc.) and have a great read!  Better yet, read the same thing someone else is reading and share your thoughts about it! Mr. Light