Welcome to HIT—How I Teach….In this episode, I teach from a fun finish this story lesson for middle school and beyond. Students usually love to finish the story with familiar tales. They already know the general story line, so for them, instead of “choose your own adventure” chapter book, they get to “choose their own finish” to given scenes—in this case, from the story of Mowgli in The Jungle Book.
So here’s what you can expect to learn in this fun, inviting lesson:
- How to use a “finish this scene” story writing lesson in general
- How to utilize sample stories and sample outlines to teach story writing
- The beauty of giving students a writing project about something they are already familiar with
- The importance of giving expectations before a writing project—and giving students all of the tools and skills they need to complete that project
- How to make various writing projects multi-level so that students of various skills can write the same story
- How to help students focus on the Topic of Paragraph for each continual paragraph that they add to the given scene—so they know exactly what they will have happen in each paragraph
- Using various outlining techniques for the project—letting kids outline in their own way when they are writing “from their brains”
- How to alter the number of paragraphs, the readability level, and the story topic when choosing your own partial scenes to use with students
- The benefit of using familiar content when students are first learning the story writing process
- How to alter the free lesson this week for classroom use vs. “around the table” use with smaller groups of students
- Much more!
(You will get this week’s HIT project as a free lesson—so you can use the Teacher’s Notebook to teach your first “finish this scene” project!)
Of course, just like every lesson in my one-month downloadable books and my one-semester Meaningful Composition books, this one also has the invaluable sample paragraph (and even a sample outline to teach from!).
And for your convenience, How I Teach…. is available as a podcast (follow along in your TN sheets for that week) and a YouTube video (with Power Point containing the same as the TN)!
Find everything you need here!
Weekly broadcast episodes with Teacher’s Notebook downloads (and links to listen or watch!) at the Language Arts Lady blog
Master (continually updated) Teacher’s Notebook downloadable booklet
Free writing books and videos of me teaching your students for you for a couple of weeks!
All of my digital books
How I Teach YouTube Channel
How I Teach Podcast
