To kick off our first writing project, Our Summer to Tweet About, we read How I Spent My Summer Vacation, by Mark Teague. From there, we tried a new activity from the book, Make Thinking Visible, by Ron Richhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison called Chalk Talk. This activity "asks learners to consider ideas, questions, or problems by silently responding in writing both to the prompt and the thoughts of others. It builds an understanding in a collaborative way."
After discussing How I Spent My Summer Vacation, we posed the question: What are your thoughts, questions, and wonderings about whether it is ok to fabricate stories to tell others? We used this question because we had an in-depth discussion on the truthfulness of the main character's recollection of his summer. This was our first attempt at digging deeper into a story, and we had no idea how it would go. We were pleasantly surprised at the "silent conversations." The kids had strong arguments for both sides, that yes it was ok, or no it was not. This is our new favorite activity, and we plan to try it again next week when we read The Name Jar.
Then, we asked the kids to write a narrow, focused paragraph about their summer. We asked them not to fabricate too much, because we really wanted to know what they did. We wanted it so short, we called it a tweet. Thank you, Amy Lemons for the idea. The kids had a fun time reliving a fun summer time activity, as well as completing the craft that went with it. We plan to use this writing in the future when we introduce how to revise our writing.
Kim and Anne
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