Mysterious Beginnings Make Magical Stories

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Objective

SWBAT: make a plan for when they are going to finish their stories, and write another story starter.

Big Idea

As we get to the end of this unit, students get a little nudge to begin choosing a story and making a plan for drafting an entire short story.

Lesson Author

Hillary Boles

Louisville, KY

Grade Level

Sixth grade

Subjects

English / Language Arts

Short Stories

Writing

Reading

Standards

RI.6.5

Analyze how a particular sentence, paragraph, chapter, or section fits into the overall structure of a text and contributes to the development of the ideas.

W.6.3

Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.

W.6.3b

Use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, pacing, and description, to develop experiences, events, and/or characters.

Guiding Question

5 minutes

Mini-Lesson

15 minutes

As I'm wrapping up the Short Story Unit, I'm thinking ahead to our next unit where the students will write a Character Analysis Essay. Along with my PLC partner, we've changed the class novel from Holes to The Fourth Stall. Today, as I read aloud from The Fourth Stall, I'm simply reading to get the kids engaged in the book. As we get further into the book (and our next unit), they will begin tracking the progress and changes in the main characters.

Work Time

25 minutes

Missing the Mark: Planning a Check-In With a Student

student example

For this unit, I use a Story Starter each day to create a bank of possible first drafts. These are rough starters, which is okay. There will be time at the end of the unit for students to expand their favorite starter into a full-blown short story. I feel that if they have a large and varied bank to choose from, they'll feel more confident being creative.

This Story Starter was taken from one of the Story Starter Generator websites I'd come across when planning the unit. If I have access to the iPads, I'd generally allow the students to use them to find a prompt, but for this lesson I had no such luck. I simply chose some of my favorites and allowed students to write from those.