Developing Narratives

First, let’s talk about I Talk Like A River by Jordan Scott. This week I read this book as well as watched the animated movie on Epic Books. I enjoyed reading this book so much that I decided that I needed to share it with my sixth-grade scholars. My students had just finished up with our poetry unit where we talked about figurative language and compared various genres and formats of poetry. I thought that this lesson would be a great addition to what they have been learning about. I first had students view the animated movie on Epic Books and jot down any examples of figurative language that they heard the speaker say in the short film. In the short film, the speaker has a stutter to accurately read the text as it was intended to be read. All of my students listened so intently to the words that were being said. After the film finished I led a discussion with students about the figurative language examples they had found and transitioned to a discussion about theme and tone. In this specific class, most students are mature, but there are occasionally one or two students that are not quite there. One student brought up the stutter immediately. He stated that it was so hard for him to listen to a short film because of the pauses. Before I even could speak to use this moment as a learning and teaching moment one student chimed in. This student said “STUDENT NAME, think about it. If it was hard for you to listen to, how do you think it was for him to read the story out loud.” This is straight from the mouths of babes. This then led to more conversations among the students. After a thorough class discussion, we decided that acceptance is so important for many reasons. People do not choose what strengths or weaknesses they have nor can they control if they have a disability of any kind. I then felt it was appropriate to ask students the ever so famous “so what” question. Students had a variety of responses, but a few that I really liked were showing kindness to everyone no matter what and accepting people for who they are. This was such a great teaching moment for me and I am forever grateful for the inspiration that I got from this course to implement some lessons and activities into my classroom. It makes my heart so happy that I have built a classroom community in such a short amount of time that is a safe space for students to ask questions, explore unfamiliar topics, and share their writing with their peers. After this activity, I had a little class time to spare and decided to have students start working on a narrative writing piece. We used I Talk Like A River as a mentor text to start constructing narrative writing pieces. I decided to have students use the Inverted Triangle to find a Specific Writing Topic on page 65 of Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature K-6. Below you can find my modeled example for students. I think that the inverted triangle offers a great organizational structure for students to begin thinking about what they would like to write their narratives about. Students start with a broad topic and then it gradually becomes more concise and detailed. Next week (weather permitting) I plan on utilizing Examining Details for a Good Fit on page 108 of Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature K-6. I think that this would be a great activity and strategy to use for helping students develop their narratives and overall writing skills.