Teacher’s Guide- Lesson Plans- How to Begin...

Preparation: Audio Clips - Student Page - How to Begin Your Story

Materials: Student Writer's Notebooks. Sentence strips or file cards. Children's trade books with opening lines or text that engage the reader.

Procedure:

Talk about how important it is to captivate the reader's interest when writing a narrative story. In other words, what makes an intriguing opening or an engaging beginning?

Tell the students they will listen to audio clips of narrative stories and they will need to identify the first opening lines.

Using examples for children's literature, write opening lines on sentences strips or file cards to be displayed in the room. Play a game with the sentence strips where each student receives a file card or sentence strip with an "opening line". They read their line to a partner, then the partner reads his or her line. Next, they find new partners and reread their opening lines. This continues until everyone has shared with everyone in the group. This allows the students to hear the language of interesting opening lines.

Have children continue to work in Writers' Workshop. As well, continue to have students practice the revising for meaning step in the writing process. Ask them to focus on the first sentences of their narrative story.

Closure: At the end of the writing session, share several examples of student writing that exemplify engaging opening lines.

Follow-up: Continue to focus on writing engaging openings. Use texts from the Resources Page to provide other examples. Also, continue to revise student writing using student examples on the overhead.