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Mini-Lessons for Writing-

Skills- (See my creativity skills sheet)

  • Effective grabbers for your stories
  • Working with a seed idea
  • Endings that tie up the story ("takeaway endings")
  • Show, Don't Tell- Extending basic descriptions
  • Onomatopoeia (ie. whoosh, bang, crackle, tick-tick-tick)
  • Alliteration
  • Focusing on one moment in time
  • Following through with your preplanning
  • Seeing if you have "BMEDSO" in your writing- Beginning, Middle, Ending, Details, Skills, and Outstanding
  • Writing similes and metaphors
  • Describing pictures
  • Describing an action scene (ie. a high speed car chase, Indiana Jones, a volcanic explosion)
  • Revising your writing with a positive attitude
  • Describing a mysterious scene
  • Using dots in writing about lingering thoughts

    Word Choice-

  • Color words
  • Different types of transition words
  • Stronger words for "said" in quotations
  • Vocabulary enrichment- showing how authors use specific vocabulary to enrich descriptions
  • Emotion words (ie. grateful, despaired, ecstatic, downcast, elated)
  • Sensory words (ie. rusty, grimy, smoky, powdery, misty, garlicky)

    Conventions-

  • Starting sentences with verbs
  • Using punctuation to make a point
  • Writing thoughts to yourself in italics
  • Using they're, their and there in your writing
  • Rules for writing proper nouns
  • Using conjunctions
  • Writing quotations
  • When to use specific transition words
  • Building stronger sentences
  • Varying between longer and shorter sentences
  • Capitalizing I and proper nouns
  • Using commas
  • Using semi-colons

    Mini-Units for Description-

  • Describing food (being a food critic)
  • Describing a travel destination/hotel
  • Being a movie critic
  • Writing recipes
  • Writing scripts for podcasting
  • Newspaper articles
  • Travel magazine writing
  • Writing fantasy
  • Writing historical fiction
  • Different forms of poetry

    Some of my favorite model text lessons from online-

  • Another book is Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, which includes several pictures with mysterious captions. Encourage your students to elaborate on the photographs included in this book.
  • Roller Coaster by Marla Frazee encourages students to write extended step-by-step replays. Another great resource for this type of lesson is watching sports coverage on the news and reading about sports in the newspaper.
  • I also always use the Black Lagoon series to have my students write an exaggerated description of a(n) (school) event.

  • All Picture Mentor Book Mini-Lessons from WritingFix
  • All Chapter Book Mini-Lessons
  • Mentor Texts for Different Types of Stories

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