Lesson 2: Dreaming the Dream of the Story

After yesterdays lesson, I realized that we did not take the time to share, reflect, or make a plan for the next day. I conferred with a few kids, but I need to help them manage the small moments in a deeper way. Students are drafting these pieces for their personal blogs which be published on the Internet, so I also need to set the clear expectation that there is a writing/drafting time and then a time to format the blog. I noticed that writing pieces were shorter as student were distracted with formatting options. So keeping that in mind, today's lesson was building a little on yesterday's lesson.

First, we reviewed the "Strategies for Generating Narratives" chart. I added several strategies to it and shared it with the class.

Strategies for Generating Personal Narrative Writing

• Think of a person who matters to you, list Small Moment stories connected to him/her and write one.
• Think of the first times, last times, or times you realized something, list stories you could tell about each and write one. 
• Think about a place that matters, list small moments, that occurred in that place and write one. 
• Think of a strong feeling. List stories of particular times you felt it and write one. 

Each student thought about which strategy they used yesterday and shared it with the group. Then I shared an example from my writers notebook that I wrote several years ago. It was about the last time I held my mothers hand before she passed away. The piece is sad, but it caught the students attention and shared the vulnerability in writing. I did this to model a narrative about last moment in my life. 

Then, I shared today's teaching point as described by Calkins and Marron.....

"Today I want to remind you that writers of stories...and this is writers of true stories as well as fictional ones, climb inside the story, walking in the shoes of the character, experiencing the story as it unfolds and putting that onto the page so readers can experience it too." 

This is summarized on a new chart titled: 

Techniques for Raising the Level of Narrative Writing

• Dream the dream of the story and then write in a way that allows them to experience the moment along with you.

With that, I shared with them aloud the story of when I hit my first home run. I set up the story and expanded on the small moment. The kids were engaged and anxious to tell me more of their stories. At that point, I had them think about what story they were going to tell today. Were they going to start a new story or climb inside the draft they started yesterday? I gave each student a partner and had them orally share their idea focusing on dreaming the story and climbing inside the story as they share. When they felt reay to write and both had a chance to share, then they went back to their lap tops to draft. Today I gave them 20 minutes to draft and 10 minutes to format their blogs.