SPOOKY STORIES CONTINUED....
An interesting thing happened after we had been doing a lot of story starters, discussions and sharing. We discussed the idea of writing our own spooky stories from scratch using all of the things we had been working on, and using our criteria. I thought this would be a great ending to this unit and that the students would leap into it with enthusiasm Our purpose to was to create our own book of spooky stories for the classroom.
They were all very keen and we used graphic organisers to plan our stories. (A simple narrative one and a 'kapiti island' story starter. Kapiti Island looks like a short story with its events (hills) leading up to a climax and then down to a conclusion). It was not long after they started drafting however, that I realised, particularly with my target group, they were reverting back to their dialogue-laden, this happened and then this happened, events-based writing, instead of their rich atmospheric and descriptive writing they had been doing when completing their story-starters. It was like they could not transfer their new skills over to their 'own' work.
I stopped the class and I actually told them what I had been seeing and we discussed why this might be happening. Most of them said that they hadn't realised that was what they had been doing. I modelled writing my own story and reminded them of what we had been working on and how to pull it all together. The power of modelling!!!!! Some of them started again and some re-worked their stories. Their end products were particularly good. Some of the boys really worked hard on improving their drafts which was a first. One of the target group who is usually sitting at 2a/3b, mostly because he can't be 'bothered' writing, wrote an amazing story that was at least a 4p/4a. The whole class loved it and when they discovered who wrote it, were very impressed. It boosted his confidence heaps!
I chose 5 examples of their writing and we worked in groups to level them using the 5 star writing guide. The groups were very accurate and levelled them well. We put these on the wall. The students liked having their writing used as exemplars.
This whole spooky story writing has been a great success. I think my challenge now is to keep these boys motivated whilst writing in other genres. How can I keep this enthusiasm when it comes to information reports, exposition, procedure etc. Do I need to actually do these in a big way? Would continuing with fiction work still continue to improve all of their writing skills anyway.....and at least they are writing and enthusiastic? Maybe I could continue with a mixture of both? Mmmmm.....
