Saturday, July 27, 2019

          Watermelon and Seed Ideas

                    How to help your students choose a small idea
                                to write a personal narrative.


Starting the Writing Process on the Right Foot


As a teacher, I always struggled with getting my students to write more focused, detailed, concise stories.  There always seemed to be a competition to see who could use the most paper to write their story. These stories often would go on and on and on.  You’ve been there. You know what I mean. This is a real struggle for teachers. How do we get our students to move away from the huge “general” story that they are used to writing to the more specific “one event” type of story.  Teachers struggle all the time with getting their students to write a more detailed story. For example, if I asked my students to write about one thing that they did over the summer, most of my students would write about their entire summer or an entire vacation.  What I am really looking for is a well written smaller event within a bigger event that includes lots of details, description, voice, etc. This is hard for some students to understand - what does it mean to write a more detailed story? What is my teacher asking me to do?  


Once I recognized that this was a real struggle for some students, I found a strategy called  “watermelon and seed ideas” when planning a story. A watermelon idea is a BIG idea, like our trip to the beach.  Seed ideas would be the events that we did while we were on our trip to the beach, for ex. building a sand castle with my cousin, jumping in the waves with my dad, catching crabs and cooking them for dinner. By having my students think of their writing as watermelon and seed ideas, I have found that they understand what I am asking of them.  This led me to create a product to help myself and other teachers guide our students in the brainstorming process. I usually begin with the planning sheet to list the watermelon idea on a picture of a watermelon and then put their seed ideas on the seeds within the watermelon picture. Once they have done this, they can take their seed ideas and list 3 details from that event.  From there, they can start to write their rough draft of their story.  


If you are interested in this product to help guide the students in your classroom, please click on the picture below.  Good luck and happy writing!!!

Watermelon and Seed Ideas


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