The Book That Changed Me......

For years I dreading teaching writing.  I loved to read stories that other people wrote but I had no idea how to teach children to write them.  Pick a character and tell what happened, right.  When students struggled I struggled to help them.  About 7 years ago my former principal introduced us to this book......

 
You can find it here on Amazon.  This book completely changed the way I teach writing.  It is broken up into parts of a good story and uses examples from professional authors.  She tells you step by step how she teaches it and her ideas and lessons are fun and engaging.  My students grow somuch as writers each year. 

Last week we started learning about "Compelling Beginnings," and already I have seen such improvement in their writing journals.  The book has several different compelling beginnigs, but as a grade level we picked three to focus on that we felt were the most age appropriate for our kiddos.  We started making our "Entertaining Beginnings," foldable book, and have worked on sound effect beginnings (always the third grade favorite) and action beginnings.  We will move onto dialogue beginnings next week. 

 


I start by introducing the beginning.  We practice several whole group, we practice on our whiteboards, we roll our story dice to change the setting and practice some more.  Finally, I give them some to practice on their own so that I can assess their learning.  You can find the practice I made for sound effect beginnings here.  I no longer dread teaching writing, in fact it is now a part of our day that I look forward to.  Would love to hear from any of you who have used this book and what you think about it.