Writing with Focus

Have you ever noticed that sometimes your brain is so full of ideas, that once you sit down to put them on paper they come flooding out and the focus becomes muddy? For a lot of students (especially mine), the answer to that question is a big, fat, Y-E-S! Through the years, I have noticed that my students have great ideas, but difficulty sticking to those ideas in their writing. Or, they try to write too big, and the interesting fall by the wayside in an effort to get down the events that happened on a particular day. That's why I had to share the awesome writing project we did earlier this year. I would LOVE to take all of the credit for this one, but I actually got this idea from a coworker who had been struggling with the same issue with her students. 

We wanted our kids to be able to pick an interesting topic, but then narrow the focus of their writing so that they could add great details and be more descriptive. Often times, when students pick a topic that they have a lot to say about, the writing becomes too general and jumps around. We wanted the students to "linger" in a specific moment in time with their audience. To do that, they had to focus their writing from broad to specific. To help my students understand this idea, we first viewed the book Zoom by Istvan Banyai. The students and I discussed that the more we "zoomed in" on each picture, the more details we were able to discover. I then related this to a microscope. As you zoom in on a microscope, you obtain more information about your subject than you would have gleaned by simply using your eyes. This visual reminder helped immensely as the students began their writing projects.

 Image courtesy of http://msmcclure.com/?page_id=6313

We started by picking events that we remembered very clearly. But, instead of writing about the entire experience, we "focused in" on a moment. It was challenging for the kids to not write about an entire trip or an entire day, but with some help they got there. I gave them a graphic organizer (see right) that was an upside-down triangle. I modeled the process of narrowing our writing focus with my own trip to the zoo during summer vacation. Rather than write generally about the whole day, I decided to write about watching the new baby gorilla playing in the pool of her enclosure. The narrowing of my topic went like this: Summer Vacation> Trip to Washington, D.C.> Zoo> Gorilla Enclosure> Watching the baby play in the pool.




Rather than have the students take off and start writing, we spent time developing good leads and then choosing the most interesting one. We discussed how to incorporate sensory language into our writing to help the reader feel as though they, too, we a part of our experience. We ended with how to write a conclusion, or "wrap," that tied back to our lead and brought our writing to a satisfying end. Below are some pictures of our final writing display, as well as examples of student work. 

 

 

I hope you find this post helpful and try it out with your students. Have you done any interesting writing projects this year?

Poems, anyone?

One of my new favorite things to do in my class is write poetry. The kids love writing poems, and it is a quick and easy go-to writing assignment. So far we have almost two poems under our belts. The first one we wrote was to piggy back off of a lesson we did on sensory language. My AMAZING teammate came up with the idea, and I loved it so much I am sharing it with you! It worked really well and I got some of the best writing I have seen from 5th graders since I started teaching!

The first thing we did was talk about how authors use sensory language to help readers feel immersed in their "world." A great book for teaching this is Smokey Night by Eve Bunting. This is the story of the Los Angeles riots told through the eyes of a child. We talked about what one would have seen, heard, smelled, and felt during this monumental event. 


After that, we talked about how colors can be described in a way that makes you see, hear, smell, feel and even taste them. We read part of the book I Love You the Purplest by Barbara M. Joosse for this activity. Joosse creates wonderful imagery through her use of descriptive sensory language. I got goosebumps! 


Finally we got to the writing. To complete their activity, the students picked a crayon with an interesting name from my box of 64 Crayola crayons. (I imagine this could be much more interesting if you had the oh-so-epic 120 count box...but alas, I don't.) We discussed how some colors were "cool" and some "warm." We talked about the mood that could be created by different colors. 


Using their crayons as inspiration (who wouldn't be inspired by colors such as "Purple Mountains Majesty" or "Tickle Me Pink"???), the students began drafting their poems using this outline from http://www.writingfix.com/:

After going through the writing process, we finally published the poems in Microsoft Word. I thought it would be neat to use the "outline" text feature for the color names so that the students could use their crayons to shade in the words. I also had them illustrate their work with pictures of what they had described. Below are some of the poems the students created: