WRITING - Q2 Week 1 Day 2
Today we used "Raymond's Run" to practice using details about a character as a way to think more deeply about a story.
We focused on the second paragraph, and talked about three details and why the author might have included them. That's the focus of the initial thinking to develop a picture of the character. Authors don't include details by chance - they include them to reveal something about a character. So, as writers, we need to make educated guesses about what details might reveal about a character.
Practice using these sentence frames to think about why the author might have included 3 details about Squeaky in "Raymond's Run":
We focused on the second paragraph, and talked about three details and why the author might have included them. That's the focus of the initial thinking to develop a picture of the character. Authors don't include details by chance - they include them to reveal something about a character. So, as writers, we need to make educated guesses about what details might reveal about a character.
Practice using these sentence frames to think about why the author might have included 3 details about Squeaky in "Raymond's Run":
- Maybe the author included this because...
- On the other hand, maybe ...
- Another reason might be...
We wrote a paragraph with answers to these sentence frames as practice for each student's essay analysis.
THEN, students chose from four of the stories we've read:
- Everything Will Be OK
- The Circuit
- Thank You Ma'am
- The Secret in the Wall
Once they decided on a story, students chose the character (if there was more than one main character) that they would analyze. They found a place in the story with details that reveal something about the character, asked themselves why the author included those details, and began a paragraph that included those thoughts using the sentence frames above.