4th - 6th Writing, October 10

Lesson:
We spent the first part of the class reviewing some basic ideas:

~ Collect your good ideas and put them into the correct paragraph form.

~ Make that paragraph easy for the reader to understand and follow by clear, logical organization that leads your reader along with you step-by-step from intro to conclusion.

~ Keep that well-organized paragraph lively and interesting to your reader by choosing vivid action verbs and strong descriptions that evoke the senses, motion, and emotion.

~ Add even more readability to your interesting paragraph by using a variety of ways to begin different sentences.


We added There is, There are, It is, and similar expressions to our no-no list as legal but weak ways to begin sentences.

To help organize and add variety to sentences, I provided each student with a sheet of transition expressions. These transitions are organized into groups that can be used to show time, location, similarities, differences, and so on, so that students can easily choose words that suit their method of organization for any writing project. We will be discussing more about using these transition words skillfully in the coming weeks, especially as we begin to emphasize sentence variety.

Up until now, most of our early writing assignments have been narratives, organized in chronological(time) order. Now we are switching to descriptive papers for a few weeks, with details organized in spatial (place) order. I told the class to imagine they are movie directors, deciding how the camera will reveal their object on screen. Will they choose to start at the top and work down? Start at the bottom and work up? Start out with a general shot and then zoom in for a close-up? Start with close focus on some small detail and then pan out to an overview? As directors, they decide what will work best. All I ask is that they be consistent,not jumping all around but rather flowing smoothly through their description, using transition expressions to guide the reader's mind like a movie camera guides the filmgoer's eye.

Next, we talked about preparing to write a description of a physical object by first spending some time observing that object using as many of the five sense as we can, really paying attention to what we can discover as we jot down our observations on our brainstorming mind maps. I showed some example objects to the class as we talked together about how we might describe the colors, textures, and so on.

To wrap up, we read aloud a few student papers, commenting on the good features, suggesting one way the authors could now use what we are learning about transitions and sentence variety to make their next papers even better.

Assignment:
Each student will write an interesting, well-organized paragraph describing a physical object. This may be any individual tangible item: a sea shell, rock, figurine, banana, apple, orange, baseball, soccer net, basketball hoop, old shoe, tea cup, candlestick, --- almost anything. We will be describing places and people later, so I do not want students to tackle those yet. A few students asked about describing pets; that is acceptable as long as the paragraph is limited to physical description, not behavior or personality. It might be easier, though, to choose an inanimate object.

Students should incorporate all we have learned, with special effort to incorporate some appropriate transitions and some sentence variety.