Small Moments

We are continuing to work on Small Moment Stories from Lucy Calkin's Units of Study.  We are having a great time storytelling. This is a picture of an anchor chart we created. We are taking large watermelon topics and pulling out the "small moment" seeds. They wrote their small moment ideas on post-its and we discussed whether their topics were watermelon or seed topics. After several read alouds and sharing stories from my own life, they are finally starting to see the importance of zooming into that smaller moment. This also gets them away from writing stories that are merely lists and moves them towards writing stories about a moment in time.

 

Good Writers...

We continued with Small Moment Stories today.  Today's read aloud was, The Shortcut by Donald Crews.  It's a perfect book to use as a model for Small Moment Stories.  As we read, students started noticing things like onomatopoeia, descriptive language, etc.   We created a chart today titled, Good Writers often...

Good Writers Often

Writing- Small Moment Stories

We started Small Moment stories today, which are my absolute favorite Lucy Calkin's Unit of Study.  You can check out Lucy Calkin's books here.  There are so many great picture books for teaching small moment stories.  Some of my favorites are- A Chair for Mother, Salt Hands, The Paperboy, Shortcut, Big Mama's, The Snowy Day, and Owl Moon.  We talked about watermelon topics (big topics) and seed stories (small moments).  Here is the anchor chart we created today in class.  Small Moment Anchor Chart