Just Right

As we come closer to the end of the unit on fiction writing my students are working hard to plan, write, and illustrate a short children's story. The unit has had many iterations over the past few years. Students have written fiction stories of their own choosing with very few limits placed on length or subject. This teacher would say that wasn't a great experience as stories were either way too long or way too short.

Next, we tried a collaborative approach. For that assignment, students worked with a partner to write a short story written in epistolary form. This run had a little more success but finding short mentor texts was problematic. Although I liked the assignment it just wasn't quite right.

It was probably about 3 or 4 years ago that the English 6 team sat down to come up with a better plan. Eventually, the short children's story was hatched as the summative assessment for the fiction unit.

Finding mentor texts was not a problem. Students were familiar with the texts as they had heard them in elementary school and breaking down those texts into the building blocks of any plot diagram is pretty darn easy. Once students can see the stories they know fit the plot diagram it becomes easier for them to create their own plot chart for a story of their very own.

In turn, many students see, for the first time, that they can "do" English. 

To me? That seems just right.