My college supervisor aassigned that I plan and teach a ELA lesson. Language Arts is not my strong area and I dread having to plan lessons in this subject. Looking back at my previous posts, it came to me to use my classroom mascot to help motivate students to right. I thought to help students make a connection to the mascot, named Wage, they could create the backstory for him. While aligning this with the Common Core State Standards, I found that Narrative Writing was one of the components often looked over.
My next thought: how can I guide these students to write a detailed narrative without given them too much guiding information. My goal was for students to use their own thoughts and imaginations to write their own background stories for Wage, but in a guided way. How was I going to do this?
Storu Cubes! If you have not heard of these, they are a set of 9 dice with 54 different pictures on them. When the dice are rolled they can be used in various ways, but I thought I would have students choose 6 out of the 9 images to use for their narratives. The choices are selected by the students rather than guided by me, which gives them a level of freedom, but guided academic choice. OF COURSE I would model what I was looking for first, and give students the instruction they need to complete the task, but I think giving the students the CHARACTER and PARTIAL INFORMATION would challenge the students enough to be engaged in the activity, enough choice that they feel free to write their own style, AND enough choice that they can draw on their own strengths.
I would be willing to make the lesson plan public, just ask in the comments.
I will write an update post after I teach the lesson on Wednesday (which I will be teaching twice).
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