Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Writing Rainbow

Many of you will remember the Children's program Reading Rainbow, that starred Geordi La Forge, I mean, Lavar Burton. I beg your pardon, my inner geek had to come out. We had our own version of the show, that I like to call Writing Rainbow. Last Thursday's class was all about the rising action of a story. The events that get the reader to the main event. I talked about the definition of rising action and what it does, the theme, aka the deeper meaning to a story, got more detailed about the plot of a story, and introduced the idea of pacing. It ended up getting pretty interesting as my fourth student came to the second class.  She'd missed the first because she'd been ill. As I lead them through the concepts, I saw that the kids were starting to form connections. Our newest edition fit right in, and picked up the story in the middle very easily. I also tried something different for this go round. As they wrote, they asked me to read a story that I had checked out of the library. I originally intended to read the story and have them identify the parts. But they were so adamant that they wanted to get writing, that I just read it. Leaving the climax for the following week. Their own writing did not suffer in the least. In fact, it seemed that they became inspired to write faster and that the ideas flowed naturally. Hence the writing rainbow idea.

Like any good teacher, and I've known plenty, I decided to teach the third student the beginning of the story after the class ended. In my one on one with her, I was surprised to see the same traits that I had growing up. She's super smart, very funny, and very talented. And she's got a rather dark sense of the absurd. She is writing a story about a humble musician who takes three risks to go to a masquerade ball.  It's turning into quite an adventure and has subterfuge in it. It's very exciting. Next up: Friday fun!

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