Cindy's add-on

Monday was a busy day for writing. The students spent the morning brainstorming and filling out a graphic organizer to help focus their narrative piece. Marie has done an excellent job (again!) explaining the sequence of events that led up to the completion of the graphic organizer. Writing an organized piece takes much planning and the students are now used to organizing their thoughts on a graphic organizer. That part went smoothly.
Having them embellish their writing piece took a bit more scaffolding. Marie and I encouraged them to really think about their plot (problem/solution) and the characters. They wrote out a rough draft independently, and all in all, the results were pretty good! The next step in writing the mini-book was to separate the story into separate "pages". I helped them find natural "breaks" in the story and we marked them with a symbol, a colored small box that we put in with a marker. This broke the story into 'pages'. Next, i had them re-write the rough draft, telling them to listen for a "beep" (the colored square), then skip a line and write the next sentence or sentences.
Once this was done, I circled one of the sentence/sentences that had been separated, and had them really focus on embellishing that one section. This broke their task into a manageable piece that I felt they could handle. The results were fabulous. Simply asking them to add more to the written piece was too overwhelming for them, so this segmenting really did the job!