I was doing a seventy minute story last week as a final exam. We did the story over a period of about fifty minutes and then the kids were to take the remainder of the period to write out the story.
I flipped the board to show the artist’s drawing of the story for ease of reference when they wrote. But I did something else – during the story I wrote down every verb as it occurred – in the form it occurred – in a column on the right side of the board.
The kids say it really helped them write. Of course, the drawing helped them, but they could play that back in their mind because it was compelling and the actors were excellent. Having each verb right there to hang the rest of the sentence on as they wrote was clearly a big hit.
I don’t know why I shouldn’t do this next year when doing stories. It’s just a new idea. I would appreciate feedback, especially if you have any classes left to test this out on.
Thank you in advance for any ideas you get. And James if we have a template for the storytelling process, we should maybe mention this somewhere in it. It might be a nice upper level option actually.
In general, the more we focus on the verbs in anything we do with the kids – word associations, CWB, OWI, PQA, stories, reading – with lots of gesturing, the better things will go. It’s an idea for next year.