River model wrap-up

Cindy and I recognized an opportunity for an added writing activity and assessment based off of the students' completed river models. We decided to have them create a brochure to invite tourists to visit their river as a persuasive writing piece. I remembered the children being very excited about Captain Dee's riverboat brochure when we went to Upper Black Eddy and thought they'd enjoy making their own. As I started to introduce the concept of the brochure on Wednesday, one of the students pulled out that very brochure from his desk! We looked at what kind of information is included in an advertisement, such as pictures, exciting sensory descriptions of what people will do and see, and contact information.
We had the students look at their river models and fill out a four square writing organizer to prompt their writings, and Cindy modeled how to fill it out on a transparency on the overhead projector. The reading specialist was with us, and she created a set of sentence starters for the kids to use when they started writing their paragraphs. Despite the modeling and the sentence starters, the writing portion was a challenge for many of the students. It took a lot of work and editing to push their ideas.
I think the students' "plateau" was evident. I'm going to read some when I go in on Friday and see if they're what we want to use as the final "copy" for their river brochure. On Friday we'll paint and stamp the background paper and draw pictures to include in the brochure. I've taken photos of ant's eye views of their maps to collage in (see above). If time allows, they'll include their writing, if not, Cindy is considering a revised, more persuasive version of the writing. On the one hand it's frustrating that this supplemental extension activity did not go as simply as I had thought it would, but on the other hand it's good to be able to identify the students' strength and weaknesses to know what we need to work on.