Writing: Old Yeller, Themes, and Response to Literature

Our grade level really struggled with writing this year, as I previously mentioned.  We asked our Reading Specialist, Emily Diehl, to come and help us out.  We wanted a format, a way to teach writing regardless of the prompt or genre of writing.  At the time we were working on our "Going West" unit in Open Court (2002) and the story we were about to read was "Old Yeller and the Bear." 
The prompt: What makes someone a hero? After reading "Old Yeller and the Bear" provide evidence of heroism in the selection. Analyze the heroic actions of the character(s) in a paragraph.

First the students have to analyze the prompt.  They underline or highlight key words.  We highlighted provide evidence, heroism, analyze, actions, paragraph.

The T stands for TOPIC.  The A stands for AUDIENCE.  The K stands for KEY WORDS.  The students had to identify and write for each. 

Then they had to do ONE graphic organizer.  I color-coded mine to match Step Up To Writing's program (green, yellow, red), but did not have access to a color copier at work so the students saw mine on the document reader, but had a gray-shade version for themselves.  I filled out all three graphic organizers, but told the students to choose which one they preferred. Some actually filled in all three.  This took two days!!

On day 3 we worked with Topic Sentences.  They had a new graphic organizer for this and so I walked them through it.  Again borrowing from Step Up to Writing, we talked about power number statements.  We listed some of those key words: couple, many, some, few, two, three, etc.  Then we reviewed the prompt and came up with: There are several acts of heroism in "Old Yeller and the Bear" and There are two heroic acts in "Old Yeller and the Bear."

We also posed a question for our reader/audience which was lifted right from the prompt: What makes someone a hero? In "Old Yeller and the Bear" two characters act in a heroic manner.

Finally, we did the FANBOYS section: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so.  The topic sentence the students generated was: Some peole think of heroes as superheroes or people who lead countries in war, but heroes can also be someone in your family or even a pet.  This page took a day, plus a few minutes into the following day.

Day Four: We took a 12x18 paper and made a folder and glued our graphic organizers down as we completed them. After the topic sentences were completed, we did the "make a plan" organizer.  We chose two topic sentences, one for the topic sentence and one for the conclusion sentence.  Then we found evidence supporting the topic sentence (the "yellow" parts of the stop and think section).  We did the green and yellow parts together, but I had the students work on the red parts, the analysis, on their own after we discussed what it would look like.  This part took about an hour session.

On the fifth day I handed students pre-cut strips of paper: two green, two gold, two pink.  I made the pink ones taller than the others because this is the "meat" of the paragraph and I wanted them to see that this is the area where they will do the most writing.  It seems redundant, but my class is 2/3 EL Learners so they need some extra practice in manipulating sentences for order/organization. Once they had the desired order down, they glued the strips down to the back of the folder.  They took this to the computer lab and typed up the paragraph.

We were fortunate enough to receive this in-service, but the opportunity didn't arrive until the middle of our third trimester.  This is definitely how I will be teaching writing from now on.  It's a nice "recipe" to have!  One thing that we've been doing as a grade level is utilizing our middle school and high school teacher/experts in the different subjects.  We've received in-services from the teachers who work at our feeder schools so there is continuity.  I have come to love this vertical collaboration!!