Teaching Fiction Writing

I have been given a summer grant to "upgrade" our fiction curriculum in my 3rd grade class. I have begun blogging about it, and I have typed up some of my research notes on a wiki. I would love people to visit the blog and the wiki to comment. This past year I had some very disjointed stories to edit that resembled video games and bizarre cartoons. How do you all battle and/or embrace media and weave it into good quality narratives?

Tags: 3rdgrade, fiction, wiki, writing

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Permalink Reply by Annie Gentithes on July 26, 2007 at 9:09pm

Hey Amy! I guess great minds think alike! I am sitting at home working on my summer grant a bit as well and have been overwhelmed by how cool this site is for connecting people and sharing ideas. Your wiki looks great! Your question is definitely thought-provoking. We certainly battle that when the students write their mythological monsters; sometimes they want to incorporate video game characters. Although it's not a new idea, we just work hard to model and balance reading literature that is a "comfortable" genre and push them outside of that genre, as well. know that you do the same. One new way of doing this that I am beginning to discover through this site might be using wikis to help the students edit one another's work. We could encourage them to look for ideas that are "familiar" to them. We could challenge them to work with peers and brainstorm ways to re-work stories so that their ideas are valued but those ideas that are based largely on media images are "stretched" or "modified" creatively.

Keep up the work - hopefully we can take some of this back to school in the fall!

Permalink Reply by Amy Koegel on July 27, 2007 at 10:12am