Next, we watched part of an interview with Kate Dicamillo, where she describes the winter of her life when she was writing Because of Winn Dixie, we talked about the descriptive language she used and how it made her story even more interesting. We then switched gears and began our own writing using the hamburger model. We watched a video describing the model and worked in groups to use a graphic organizer to practice using it to answer the question “Should students be rewarded for good grades?”. After getting some group practice with the hamburger method, it was time for them to try again on their own answering the question, “should schools require uniforms?” and then sharing their writing with someone they haven’t talked to yet today. We finished off our morning playing a four-corner version of a Kahoot to practice our grammar and editing skills.

After lunch, it was finally time to begin writing their full first drafts! We spent days 1 and 2 generating ideas and brainstorming what we wanted to write about for our autobiography about a moment that changed us. Students were told that their writing would be read aloud on Friday so make sure to pick a topic that you are comfortable reading about to the class! Our goal is at least 2 pages of writing but 3 or 4 pages would be even better and based on our rough drafts, everyone is going to meet that goal pretty easily!

We ended our day by revisiting the old Schoolhouse Rock videos about adjectives, nouns, and conjunctions- we watched them yesterday and they were such a hit we had to watch them again! They were shocked to hear they were created in the 70’s.

Tomorrow, we will begin editing and revising our rough drafts to make them even better than they are right now. We all loved our “Important Thing” poems so much that we are going to look at another poem that is a similar topic called “Where I’m From” and create our own.