The Sincerest Form of Flattery

This year, I'm trying to express a focus of the week (or weeks) in a question. So the weekly schedule sort of goes like this: on Monday, the students explore the question by interacting with their independent reading, on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, they work to answer this guiding question through our common texts and apply the principles we've uncovered to their writing.

I think it's a sound idea, and I'm trying to make the questions broad enough that we can circle back to them throughout the year in different contexts with different genres in order to build understanding of concepts.

So far the focus questions have been:

What draws you into a book?
How do writers use sensory details to create an experience for the reader?
Where does poetry hide?
How do writers use figurative language to create meaning?
How do writers use models to improve their craft?

The last one is our focus this week, so today I asked them to choose sentences from their books, break them down, and then write similar sentences. What an interesting day we had. We started with a conversation about how artists or craftsmen use models. Students offered ideas about painters, musicians, carpenters, and chefs. Then we used a model that I had chosen because it had figurative language, sensory details, and a dash, to review what we'd already focused on and to introduce the notion of deliberate punctuation. Finally, they did their own thing, and by their work, I was able to assess how much they got of the lesson.

Using sentence-level models from real literature offers an effective way to talk about and teach grammar and punctuation in a meaningful context, especially if students have chosen both the passage and the book. Tomorrow we're going to read George Ella Lyon's poem, Where I'm From, and the students will have a chance to use it as a model for their own poems.