You may have heard your students talking about Boot Camp. We are doing our basic training in writing through Writing Boot Camp. We started by taking a light bulb paper and writing down any ideas we have that we can write about (going to the zoo, Great America, Disney World, Wisconsin Dells, sleepovers, birthdays, holidays, Disney on Ice, circus, losing a tooth, school, friends, family, any vacations or special events...). Once we finished brainstorming the ideas we could think of, we shared our ideas with our table groups to see if we could add more to our list that we didn't think of. Then we shared as a whole class. This helped most of the students to fill their light bulb up. Next we moved on to talk about narrowing those ideas down from a Big Moment to a Small Moment. We demonstrated this by holding are arms out to the side straight and just keeping them there for a minute. The students arms started to get tired. We talked about how Big Moments are like that, they stretch out too big and are too much. We then swooped our arms in to narrow down our moment. So for instance instead of talking all about school, narrow it down to the first day of school, or your favorite class/subject in school. The students then got their writing boot camp dog tags and made their boot camp bags. After they created their bags they chose one big moment from their idea page and then decided how to narrow down that to a small moment. My example for them was: big moment - Disney World, small moment - Early Morning Magic at Magic Kingdom our first day. Then students got supply cards. They wrote out a detail on each supply card to pack into their boot camp bag. Once their bags were packed, they were ready to begin writing. They needed to put their details in order and add opening and closing sentences. We did mini-lessons on complete vs. incomplete sentences, simple and compound sentences, and plain vs. fancy sentences. After that we talked about the next step in the writing process, Revising. We used my writing as an example. We went sentence by sentence to see if I could add an details or adjectives to my sentences to make them better. We used blue colored pencil to insert them. Students then worked on doing this to their own writing. Next up we will do mini-lessons for Editing and students will learn how to edit their writing (look for capitals, punctuation, and spelling errors) and use red to fix their mistakes.
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