Writing Internal Story

My students are blossoming into wonderful writers.  We are having a blast learning about small moment stories.  Some of them are eagerly writing their 3rd or 4th story.  Today, we talked about how we can make our stories even better by adding internal story.  We brainstormed a list of sentence starters to help us add internal thoughts and feelings to the stories we are writing.  You can see our anchor chart below.   

 

Small Moment Booklets

We are continuing to write Small Moment stories.  Before they were ready to begin writing their Small Moment stories, they had to choose a topic and plan their stories in  their watermelon booklet. The watermelon reminds them to take a large topic and pull out a tiny moment (seed) from that larger topic.  Each page is labeled B,M, and E for beginning, middle, and end.  The beginning should introduce their characters and setting.  The middle should have a problem, and the end should be the solution to the problem.  They simply jotted down a couple sentences for each part in their booklet.  Then, they were ready to begin their stories.  They are currently writing their stories, and elaborating on what they wrote in their watermelon booklet.

 Click on the image below for a free copy of the booklet

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.

 

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