Our Writing -Update...

Our Touchstone Texts:

We used "What You Know First" by Patricia MacLachlan to learn about 'internal conflict'.

We used 'Freedom Summer' by Deborah Wiles to learn about "snapshots" and internal conflict.We Used 'Baby' by Patricia MacLachlan to learn about "Luscious leads".

We used "Hello, Harvest Moon" by Ralph Fletcher to learn about 'memorable language'.

We used 'Water Dance' by Thomas Locker to learn about text structure.

We used 'My Chinatown' to learn about 'word choices.

We have been immersing ourselves in the writing of excellent authors. We have used our "reading like a writer" eyes to notice memorable writing, good word choices and interesting text structures: circular, alphabet, repetitive words and phrases. We have seen how writers pull their readers into the writing with strong leads...

Last week, we began generating ideas for a piece of our own. We saw how writers often create pieces in which characters have 'internal conflict'. Internal conflict is when a character is being pulled in two directions at once and has to decided between two things. It is a dilemma/problem.

We then brainstormed ourselves of times when we had 'internal conflict'...

We saw how some writers create 'snapshots' - by zooming into a moment of time and focusing on all the details of that moment to make the writing really interesting and 'juicy' to read. We then chose a moment - wrote it regularly and then we made a 'snapshot' of the moment and zoomed in to describe and frame all the details!

Our class has really enjoyed noticing and practicing these strategies! We have become experts at "reading like writers"!