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Middle School Teachers Chatboard

MS LA teachers...Help

by Not an english teacher

Nov 18, 2013

Going to do a joint project with the photography teacher. Her students took 4-5 pictures of objects around the school (no people). Now the reading teachers are going to have the students write narratives to tell a story about those pictures.

I have not done much with writing narratives. What I have planned is to do a pre-write with the students. I show a picture or collage of pictures I have taken of objects. Kids write a description of what they see in their journals. Next in groups of 4 they discuss what they wrote. Then we come back together as a group and discuss the writings and possibly write a whole class three paragraph narrative.

Is this the right approach? The students will probably do a sloppy copy/peer edit/ and make a final copy on their Chrome books. Do I need more mini lessons on narrative writing? We have done setting and such with regular reading class another things I could do as lessons. This will be a 5 day project in double class periods of 8th ...See More

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LA Teacher On 11/18/13, Not an english teacher wrote:

. You're asking them to make up a story? As in tell us what happened in this photo?

You'll find that not every child who can read can also write.... Weak readers are never strong writers and strong readers aren't necessarily strong writers.

Not having people in the photographs...See MoreOn 11/18/13, Not an english teacher wrote:

. You're asking them to make up a story? As in tell us what happened in this photo?

You'll find that not every child who can read can also write.... Weak readers are never strong writers and strong readers aren't necessarily strong writers.

Not having people in the photographs will make it harder not easier to generate writing about the photograph particularly to generate a story. A story about what? A tree? It can be done but what's the goal?

In writing instruction there is often a confusion of goals. What is it you want to accomplish? To further their writing skills or teach a style of writing?

What we do in writing instruction is take students some to many of whom are not strong writers and then ask them to tailor or fit their writing into a genre of writing. The reality is - a genre of writing cannot be taught in any brief period of time but know it's commonly done. If the intention is to expose the kids to the concept of different genres of writing , then two weeks spent doing that is enough time because their attention spans will not hold out for longer than two weeks.

But will they write good narratives based on this project as you've described it? If they pretty much as a group are good writers, then they might. I think though the underlying idea - the photographs - they could strike observers as a catchy idea and is the stuff Principals live to tell parents is creative teaching - I think it's not the best approach for fostering narrative writing. Poetry maybe....

Unless.... these kids are pretty special and they might be. If you want kids to generate language, stories, narratives better to give them a prompt that fosters that.

But I could be wrong and hope your kids went to town with this project.

> Going to do a joint project with the photography teacher. > Her students took 4-5 pictures of objects around the school > (no people). Now the reading teachers are going to have the > students write narratives to tell a story about those > pictures. > > I have not done much with writing narratives. What I have > planned is to do a pre-write with the students. I show a > picture or collage of pictures I have taken of objects. > Kids write a description of what they see in their > journals. Next in groups of 4 they discuss what they wrote. > Then we come back together as a group and discuss the > writings and possibly write a whole class three paragraph > narrative. > > Is this the right approach? The students will probably do a > sloppy copy/peer edit/ and make a final copy on their > Chrome books. Do I need more mini lessons on narrative > writing? We have done setting and such with regular reading > class another things I could do as lessons. This will be a > 5 day project in double class periods of 8th graders. > > What are your suggestions? > > Thank you!

Nov 29, 2013

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