Name:
Email:
Name of exercise or lesson:
What is the focus? (poetry, personal narrative, invention exercises, peer conferencing, revision, etc)
What Illinois Language Arts Standards does it address?
Rationale–I use this lesson because…I learned it from…(Maybe this field should be the longest??)
Procedures: What I do as teacher What my students do
Notes for someone using this lesson
Potato Chip Writing Project.
Details: Take a bag of potato chips, I found Ruffels work best because of extra detail, and put them carefully on a table. Each student chooses one. Remind, not for eating. Study the chip and then write a description with the intention of another student identifying the chip from your description. Author is not allowed to mark or code his/her chip for identification purposes.
Place all the chips back in the pile. For extra challenge include extra chips.
Purpose and benefits: Obviously the first purpose is an exercise in descriptive writing. It is simplistic and will get moans and groans but kids will also accept the challenge. It’s easy to cheat but hard to fail so two important goals are practiced. Once they bite (pardon the pun) into the project they will discover easy details are quickly used up with little benefit. Then the fun starts.
Eventually someone will think to ask for a ruler, or measuring device. Sometimes a magnifier. Creativity starts here.
Analogies, similie and metaphor quickly begin to appear. Most of them won’t be very good but it’s the process that’s important. And in the end if it helps make a correct identification that’s the point of description for identification.
Time: This can be done in a 50 minute class period but that’s really pushing it. It’s a good assignment for block schedule.
Pedagogy: Admittedly this is simplistic and a long way from literature. But it immediately eliminates the teacher as the audience and makes the class as a whole the audience. It connects the writer to the project until the very end – when someone reads the description and chooses a chip the author must confirm the ID. I like the ethics embedded in this. It’s so easy to cheat but that actually takes the fun out of it. Kids will recognize and accept the challenge with genuineness. After spending some time doing descriptive writing this is a good activity to go back too. Most kids will enjoy measuring themselves against their first effort. But twice is the life expectancy of this activity.
Connection to IL. testing goals: I don’t know what those are but I hope audience, details, ownership, unique/creative language, and voice are at the top of those goals.
I tried something with my sophomores that involved characters and perspective. They each drew a card with a character’s name from Mockingbird on it and were grouped by those names drawn. (All Scouts worked together, etc.) As a group of three, they then drew another name and had to compose a note from their character to the one they drew. This involved knowledge and understanding of the characters, a writing assignment, group consensus, speaking, and listening. After they had composed the note, it was posted on the sheet on the wall with the character’s name on it. The next task was to take a note from a random sheet and compose a rely. Both notes were then read aloud for whole class discussion. As a final activity, the group wrote a diamante that started with one character and blended into another. They wrote some amazing notes and poems. I like this as a possible alternative to the character analysis. I saw a form of this activity done by one of my colleagues from the Writing Project, and I thought I could adapt it to work in my classroom. The students seemed to enjoy the assignment and were pretty creative.
Karen- I will tell you that you have a lot of my students from last year. I have had several kids come tell me that they LOVED this assignment:) Good job!
Thanks for the feedback, Sara. The students never tell me what they do like, but they sure do tell me what they don’t like. I tried a modified version of this with my Mod. Lit class today. The did a pretty good job too.
I decided to try the modified Socratic Seminar with my Mod. Lit. students today. We are reading the Sherman Alexie novel, and they are really interested in it. I asked them to design a question that could not be answered with a simple factual answer, but one that requied inference, evaluation, or prediction. I put a list of the 12 words from our list of testing verbs on the board to use as starters. In addition to the question, I asked for one event from the chapters that surprised, amused, or evoked some response from them. These were written on a notecard. We formed a circle and they took turns posing their questions and sharing their statements with each other. The discussion was very productive. I was even more pleased with the care they took in writing good questions. It took some explaining as to the type of questions I wanted, but after I helped a few of them and many more asked me to read their questions to see if they were okay, we had a good class discussion. They asked me to do this with them again. One of the most profound questions of the hour came from a student with an IEP. There were some glitches; they often wanted to talk all at once, but since they all wanted to answer, I viewed that as a good problem. I got a few silly answers, but very few. When I have tried to discuss in a teacher directed format, I did not get much response. They were much more attentive and responsive today. This reinforces the idea in my mind that our students in basic classes are sometimes not given the chance to show how they can step up to higher level discussions, but they are quite capable.