The topic? "Celebrating a Century: America's National Park System." In 1,000 words or less, our mission was to depict -- in journal form -- the wonders of one specific American national park. Hmmm. Not only did the prompt provide our research topic for the year -- SCORE! -- it required the students to create characters, advance a plot in journal form, and make lavish use of descriptive writing about the setting.
Reading and writing should be inextricably interwoven in the teaching of Language Arts, and it's important that we continuously find ways to wed our students' reading to their writing activities. But that's not always easy (especially for novice teachers). In the end, this DAR writing contest provided a beautifully authentic opportunity for the students to use their self-selected text as a resource material. Even better, it enabled me and my students to experience the natural flow of an integrated Language Arts project.
After the students had chosen the parks they wanted to research, we began to scour our home and class libraries for trade books set in locations with similar geographic features: beaches, forests, deserts. Unearthed gems were placed on a whiteboard tray for easy access. Here are a few that we found:
Whenever students encountered a great descriptive passage, they would mark the spot with a sticky note to facilitate easy access for their classmates. Students were also offered the option to write out such passages and tape them to a collection of "Descriptive Passages From Books" posted on a window.
During the pre-writing process of the "journals," passages that we found -- like the following excerpt from Peter Brown's The Wild Robot * -- provided the class with wonderful opportunities for collecting specific nouns, active verbs, and adjectives to describe the sights, smells, and sounds of nature. We also found an abundance of sentences to use for sentence modelling activities.
" . . . instead of crashing against the rocks, [the last crate] sloshed against the
remains of the first four crates. Soon, more waves were heaving it up out of the water.
It soared through the air, spinning and glistening until it slammed down onto a tall
shelf of rock. The crate was cracked and crumpled, but the robot inside was safe."
Sentences like these can also be used during the revision process for mini-lessons on incorporating sound devices like onomatopoeia and alliteration in prose.
By reading and analyzing skillfully crafted text such as this, and using it to model their own prose, the students expanded their vocabularies and developed more sophisticated sentence structures without even knowing it was happening!
The added bonus? Throughout this use of our classroom library, many students found titles they wanted to add to their "Books I Want to Read" lists in the back of their Language Arts notebook. For example:
If you are interested in learning more about using a "Books I Want to Read" list with your students, please visit these earlier posts from The Sustained Reader:
- The Best Book List Ever!
- Starting the Student Book Buzz
- Using Book Trailers in Your Language Arts Classroom
Next Up: Teach your students how to draw upon their reading as a means of enriching their own writing in Enrich Student Writing by Mining for "Gems."