Community Narratives

On Monday Cindy started us off with a review of "Showing, not Telling" sentences. We selected a few of the children's applique blocks to pull out a simple sentence, and the children had to come up with descriptive adjectives and adverbs using their thesauruses to expand their sentences. For example:

Seth's urban burglar on the roof

"The burglar is on the roof" (typical simple 3rd grade sentence inspired by one of the embroideries)
burglar: sneaky, quiet, malicious, bad, bungling, etc.
roof: slanted, flat, tall, high, pitched, slippery, dangerous, etc.
is? (could be a more active sentence): climbed quietly, slinked carefully, waited patiently, tip-toed precariously, etc.
==> "The quiet, sneaky burglar slinked carefully across the slippery, slanted roof" (much more interesting sentence!)

After creating some more interesting sentences, we explained that entire stories could come out of the children's pictures. We talked about using the setting (rural, suburban, urban) from their pictures and choosing characters to live there (perhaps from the details they stitched). We came up with some examples of problems and solutions the characters might experience if they lived inside the children's pictures. Then we brainstormed what a beginning, middle, and end of the story might be. The children were provided with a graphic organizer to use for their brainstorming, and I passed their embroideries back to them. I encouraged the students to look at what they had created, imagine themselves entering the picture, and think about what it might be like to live there- what would it be like? What problems would there be?

Alex said she had a daycare center, a school, a park, and an animal adoption center. She made up a story where the children from the school went to visit the adoption center, but a dog escaped, ran around the park, and the children helped capture him again! 

Cindy and I worked around the room, talked to the children about their plans, helped elicit ideas, and kept everyone focused. When children were stuck I asked them to tell me a little about their picture- what buildings had they included, who lived there, what's happening, where could people go, what could they do in that community?
The brainstorming activity took up our morning session, but all the children completed their organizer for the writing of a narrative problem/solution story based off of their community applique embroidery. Since we need to make up some time, we decided I should stay for the afternoon as well to work towards our next goal of a finished written piece inspired by their own artwork.

Emily's grumpy farmer- his sheep kept escaping to the clover field

In our afternoon session Cindy modeled how to use the graphic organizer to flesh out a story using one of the children's appliques and organizers. As a class we offered both plot suggestions as well as vocabulary suggestions for making the story more fun and interesting for the reader. Doing this as a group hopefully helped the children see how the descriptive words they choose can help a writer make decisions. For example, if a character is a "grumpy farmer", well why was he grumpy in the first place? Once the activity was modeled, we passed out writing paper to start the first draft. Again Cindy and I worked the room, helping students stay on task, asking questions to spark their imagination, and editing the drafts as they were complete.

We've decided to have the children create another handmade book for the final version of the stories and illustrate them. I'm scanning thir pictures in to print and use for the covers.