Arc of Story: Week 1 Reflection

It’s Saturday and I’ve just finished planning the lessons for the second week of our realistic fiction unit and creating some tools to help my writers.

Mini-Lesson Breakdown

This is the week where I’m going to attempt to really tackle each of my goals in mini-lessons:

• Session 5 – Plotting with a Story Arc (I’ll be emphasizing the importance of just a few scenes, and how the problem can still intensify in such a short time period)
• Session 6 – Show, Don’t Tell – Planning and Writing Scenes (I’ll introduce a show, don’t tell chart that includes examples of telling vs showing as well as dialogue; I’ll also provide students with a tool that Ana made to show feelings by using actions)
• Session 7 – Feeling and Drafting the Heart of Your Story (This lesson is all about losing yourself in your story while you draft. Last year we did some envisioning, enacting, and drafting, but this year I’ll try having them ask themselves what the heart of the story is before/while they envision and embody their characters)
• Session 8 – Using Transitions to Give Your Writing a Flow (While the first 3 sessions of this week are adapted from the TC unit, this lesson I created based on the needs of my students. We’ll take a look at the narrative checklist and then I’ll give writers a transitions tool to keep in their folders. They’ll re-read one part of their draft during the active engagement and look for where they might need transitions)

“How’s it going?”

One thing I’m proud of myself for this last week is that I checked the writers notebooks every day, keeping track of where students are in terms of trying out the mini-lessons, doing writing at home, etc. This helped me to schedule some small group sessions, which was super necessary, because I realized that with 23 students, and realistically only 25 minutes of independent writing each day (I know, it’s short — our day is tight), there’s no way I can conference with every writer every week.

I also purchased Jennifer Serravallo’s Teaching Writing in Small Groups to complement my professional reading with the Carl Anderson book. I’m really excited about the Skill Progressions that Jennifer has outlined, because they’re a really easy tool to know what to teach next based on a particular student or group’s goal.

I still have lots of room to grow in small group instruction, but at least for right now I can say:

1. I know what my students are writing and where they’re at in the writing process.
2. I met with all students last week (except one who was absent for two days), either in a conference or a small group. Hooray!

Now I just need to assign goals to each student and make a plan for this week’s small groups! But first, I’m going to take a break.