Friday, February 25, 2011

Our New Writing Unit - Touchstone Texts and Reading like a Writer...

We have begun immersion into our new unit. We will be reading other author's work like a writer and noticing and modelling their techniques!

The last 2 units we learnt how to move through the writing process from brainstorming to publishing when writing a narrative and a piece of non-fiction. In this unit we will be especially emphasizing good techniques and styles of a writer!

On Tuesday, we read 'Hello, Harvest Moon' by Ralph Fletcher. We noticed the wonderful language he uses that makes us go "ooh, aah". We discussed how writers start off with ordinary language and work hard to make it extraordinary. We found so much memorable language in this book, describing the moon.

Then we got to work ourselves! we wrote three ordinary sentences and changed them into memorable language.

These are some examples of what students in our class wrote:

Ordinary language --------------------memorable language

my baby likes to crawl around ------------ My baby is a born explorer

The rain is loud --------------------The rain is scratching the sky, with a drizzling, loud sound

The milk is good------------------------------- The milk tastes gorgeous

cold ---------------------------------------Crisp cool air

My sister is cute -----------------------My sister is adorably cute

It shines -------------------------------It gleams and glows

On Thursday we noticed the word choices that were used in 'My Chinatown'. We each had our own copy of the text and we highlighted words and sentences that we think are wonderful. We discussed that when a writer describes well, we get a real picture in our mind. We then chose 3 memorable phrases that we liked and illustrated them!

We will be carrying on immersing ourselves in techniques and strategies that we can learn from these authors and then we will be beginning a piece of our own...

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