I recently had the pleasure of co-teaching with a wonderful reading teacher, Kelly Arkwright. Mrs. Arkwright, the Title 1 reading teacher at Adams Elementary, wanted to take a select group of student’s writing to the next level. We quickly planned out the project and excitedly introduced it to the students.
The project – Students chose three chapters books to read and develop a common theme across all three books. Students then wrote a story using the same theme. After the stories were completed they marketed their stories to a grade level below to see who “sold” the most. This project took place over the course of a couple of months.
We started off by having the students choose three chapter books. They were able to choose any of the chapter books in the library. The only requirement was they had to find a theme that was common in all three books. The students came up with some great themes such as, magic, being immortal, adventure, chocolate and discrimination.
After the books were read they then started writing their stories based on their selected theme. We had the students do all of their work in Google Drive. This allowed the students to work on their stories at both school and home. Google Drive also allowed the teachers the ability to read student work, comment, and respond to comments from anywhere.
Once the students had a rough draft of their work we then Skyped with author John David Anderson. The students came up with their own questions and asked Mr. Anderson specifics on how to improve their stories. John David Anderson was patient and answered all the student’s questions. I was completely impressed by the level of questions the students asked. My absolute favorite question was, “People read my story but don’t care about my main character. How can I make them care about him.” That’s a 100 percent real question that came from the student. Awesome!
The students then took the notes and revised their stories. It was amazing to see how motivated they were to write!
Tomorrow’s blog post we’ll go into the next phase of the project, the marketing.
