Teacher’s Guide- Lesson Plans- Coming to a Close

Preparation: Audio Clips - Student Page - Coming to a Close

Materials: Student Writer's Notebooks. Sentence strips or file cards. Children's trade books with final lines or text that "closes the door" on the story.

Procedure:

Talk about how important it is to bring closure to a narrative story. It is important to bring together all of the elements of your story and let your reader know you are "closing the door" or ending your story. It should give the reader satisfaction that they have "understood" your important moment. There are many ways to bring closure to a story.

Tell the students they will listen to audio clips of narrative stories and they will need to identify the closing lines. Discuss how each closing line was different and what made it effective.

Write some of these lines on sentences strips or file cards to be displayed in the room. Use audio clips and narrative stories listed in the Resources Page as well as books from your classroom library.

Play a game with the sentence strips where each student receives a file card or sentence strip with an "closing 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 closing lines.

Have children continue to work in Writers' Workshop. Ask them to focus on the closing or final sentences of their narrative story. As well, introduce the editing step (spelling, punctutation, and grammar) of the writing process.

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, begin to edit student writing using student examples on the overhead.