Small Moments Narratives

We are nearing the end of our first unit in writing workshop as well. We have been writing stories about small moments from our lives-- small moments meaning the time I fell off my bike, or the time I went on the big slide at the fair, rather than tales about an entire day or a whole vacation. We've learned how to write a story: make a plan, make a quick sketch across the pages, write, then revise, rereading your work.

We've worked to make our stories better and stronger-- having them come alive so our readers can really picture it like a movie in their heads by doing things like having characters talk, telling exactly what happened in small steps, telling how we felt or what we were thinking in the moment.

In the final part of our unit, we studied a mentor text called Night of the Veggie Monster. It's a favorite picture book in our classroom right now and is a nice example of a small moment-- a boy not wanting to eat his peas at dinner-- told as a really entertaining story (I've read it over twelve times (it's short) and students still find it delightful!). We noticed some things that the author, George McClements, did that we loved that really made the story special, like ellipses(...) to make exciting parts more suspenseful, writing exact actions to give good detail ("My fingers became all wiggly"), and writing some words big and/or bold to show they are important and make the reader read them in a STRONG voice. We've tried out some of these features in our own stories. The point is not that any one of these features is necessary, but that any one of them may suit our story and improve our writing. And, studying an author helps writers see books from a writer's perspective, and realize that this is something writers do-- getting ideas from other writers.

We also took a stab at gleaning some ideas from another mentor author, Kevin Henkes. We have read a lot of Kevin Henkes books this fall in read aloud. In pairs this week, students reread one book and marked parts where they noticed Kevin Henkes did something they might want to try in their own writing. We marked the parts we liked with post-it notes to be able to share them. (First graders love post-it notes!)

This week each student chose a favorite story from his/her folder, one that showed off how much they've each grown as writers, and revised it by adding something it didn't already have, such as dialogue or pop-out words or feelings. Then we edited it for spaces, capitals, ending punctuation, and spelling of certain high-frequency "trick words" that are on our word wall. We'll be fancying it up even more in order to "publish" it with a title and cover and are due to celebrate by sharing them with one another soon!