Using the “Inventing a New Word” lesson
WritingFix has a fabulous (and free-to-use) on-line lesson inspired by Andrew Clements’ chapter book, Frindle. Click here to read the lesson’s overview and have access to all its resources.
If you’ve used this lesson with your students, we want to hear:
1) What worked well for you with the lesson; or…
2) What adaptations did you make to have success with your students; or…
3) Anything else you think other teachers would enjoy hearing.
Thank you in advance for participating in this community.
1 Response to Using the “Inventing a New Word” lesson
February 22nd, 2010 at 8:51 pm
I used this lesson with my 5th grade students and they really had fun with it. I first showed/read them the mentor text page from the novel, then we discussed how we could write about our own rooms. To get them to write more meaningfully about the items in their rooms, I prompted them with, “mention the object in your room and describe what I would see with details. Then tell me something about the object that I could not possibly know by looking at it, such as ‘I received this signed baseball when my grandfather took me to a Mariner’s game a year before he passed away.’” I told them, readers want to know about the emotion and the story behind the story. They turned out some really great pieces. I will consider having them published here.