Summer SAVY 2019: Session 3, Day 5 – Stories Galore! (Rising 3rd/4th)

Posted by hallep on Friday, June 28, 2019 in Grade 3, Grade 4, SAVY.

Hi families,

It was lovely to see you at the showcase this afternoon! Here’s what happened beforehand: having

written so diligently all week long, the class earned a bonus genre for today: scary stories. I read Juanita Havill’s short story “The Mysterious Girl at the Pool” aloud to the class, lighting up my face with

my creepy flashlight as I went. (At least, I tried to be creepy; it was nine a.m. with sunshine comingthrough the windows.) Then, we all wrote scary stories of our own, with a particular focus on tension-building. The goal was to take the story from a situation that was just slightly weird (a living suit of armor, in one student’s story) to a fairly scary situation (a riddle-asking python, in another), to the absolute scariest (minotaurs, raging bulls, ghost kings, etc).

Later on, we played a review game to test our knowledge from the week (congrats, Team Legend!), and rehearsed our presentations for the showcase. Then, after our end-of-week assessment, it was time for our final challenge of the week: genre-bending. I challenged the class to write a one-page story in which elements of all five of our genres were present, to excellent results.

Thanks for sending your kids to us this week! This was truly a good group—thoughtful, diligent writers, who consistently treated one another with kindness and respect. They were a pleasure to teach.

Maddy