Co-Teaching February 29, 2012

Generating Ideas Using Your Senses

Grade: 2

Subject: Writing

Co-teachers: Fern, Lisa, Indra, Margaret

Curriculum Expectations from the Ontario Curriculum

Overall

• Generate ideas about a potential topic using a variety of strategies and resources.

Big Ideas

• Take a small topic and use ideas to describe the topic in details.
• Recognize that the details of a piece of writing come from brainstorming ideas.
• Use webs and lists.
• Use ideas to elaborate and to write descriptively.

Materials

• writing paper
• All the Places to Love by Patricia MacLachlan
• Chart paper divided into three sections

Resources

• Ontario Ministry of Education: Language (2006)
• Trait-Based Mini-Lessons for Teaching Writing

Lesson Plan

Activation (Whole Group, 15 Minutes)

• Review sense that we have (sight, taste, touch, smell, hearing)
• Use senses to describe an apple, Canada's Wonderland, walking through the forest on our trip to Downsview Park
• Read All the Places to Love by Patricia MacLachlan and show the picture of the child wearing a raincoat and looking at a turtle.
• Imagine you are in the picture.  What do you see?  Record responses on the chart paper under "I See"
• Repeat for "I Feel" and "I Hear"

Getting Ready (Whole Group, 2 to 3 Minutes)

• Invite students to "put themselves" in the picture and write about what they see, hear, and feel.
• They may use ideas from the chart and encourage them to use only a few ideas from each section
• To get them started, I ask "What would be a good first sentence for this piece of writing?" Brainstorm ideas and I may have them share their ideas with a partner in the class.
• Write a first sentence to help the reader know that they piece is about...
• Remember to include all of your senses in your description.
• Describe how to create a web to record our ideas.

Independent Task

• Use the web to describe the picture.  Your title is "A Rainy Day".

Consolidation

• Record students ideas on a web on the chalkboard.

Lesson Observations/Debriefing

• design lessons using the model of the three part lesson
• the web could have been done in groups or pairs
• students needed prompting to come up with descriptive vocabulary
• the topic was too big; it would have been better to focus on just one thing in the picture
• not all the senses could be used for each topic (e.g. turtle --> you are not going to taste the turtle)

Next Steps

• Continue to use webbing to extend a main idea related to a topic.
• Focus on a few familiar graphic organizers (BME, CSA, picture, web)
• Students will learn to choose an appropriate graphic organizer for the task at hand

Learning Goals

• Brainstorm ideas about a topic you want to write about.