A plan for what each of my creative writing lesson will include. Focuses on level 4 VELS where students will produce an piece of writing.
I completed my final year placement in a grade 5 class at St. Francis of Assisi Primary School. At the time of my arrival the students were looking at environment and sustainability. My objective was to create and implement an inquiry unit for students, which is related to the environment and sustainability topic. Along with my mentor teacher I used the movie “The Lorax.” The aim was for students to watch the Lorax, find a particular environmental issue, research it and write a creative story that highlights the environmental issue they have chosen. The final assessment was to write a story for their grade 1 buddy, using the Lorax story as a guide, to create their own story about their environmental issue with made up characters and places. The criteria I set for this story included:
· Introduction
· Dialogue
· Action
· Description – Characters, Setting, Issue etc.
· Characters with suitable names
· Describe what they look like and how they move.
· Try to show their personalities in the things they do and show how characters feel using adjectives and adverbs
· Setting
· Ending
Before students began writing their story I showed them a PowerPoint presentation which showed positive examples of writing pieces, how to write an introduction, body and ending and demonstrated how to describe characters, settings and issues. This assisted students as their writing was very creative, descriptive and flowed. Students began by writing drafts and were encouraged to get them conferenced by a classmate before coming to the teachers. Only when the teacher had conferenced it could they type their stories of their laptops.
Students really enjoyed this unit as they were writing something they were interested in and had a target audience. Students knew that their work was going to be read by their grade one buddies and wanted to make it as colourful and interesting as possible.
In order to assess their story I used the FOR, AS, and OF assessment method. I looked at their drafts before they were conferenced which allowed me to track progression and find out what are students’ strengths and in which areas of creative writing students needed to improve.
Lesson One - Students watch the 1970's movie 'The Lorax.' And are introduce on how to write a creative story piece.
Lesson 2 - Strong emphasis on researching an environmental topic and how is effects the world.
Lesson 3 - Concentrated on what goes into a good story and some of the different strategies involved in a story.
Lesson 3 - More strategies to assist students.
Lesson 3 - I also used these strategies as a form of assessment. I used them to assess the students stories.
Lesson 3 - there were also help hints to assist students in the correct writing processes and what not to put into their story.
Lesson 4 - I used a PowerPoint presentation and a demonstration of how to use descriptive words and how to explain a setting.