The boys and girls have been practicing the Writing Process by prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing their work. We are solid in our knowledge of how to create a topic sentence, come up with key ideas, and generate details. We are also good at filling out a brief outline as a part of our prewriting :)
Transitioning from outlines to drafts is challenging because formulating full sentences from brief ones is a larger process. To aid in this process we talked about stretching sentences- or making a "Gumby" sentence!
We read a wonderful story called "That Rabbit Belongs To Emily Brown" about a girl with a stuffed animal rabbit named Stanley, and a vivid imagination! In the story, the Royal Queen will do anything to get Stanley away from Emily Brown. After we read the story we talked about some key details. One key detail that continued to pop up was "there was a rabbit".
You can see in the poster that we wrote this idea down. Little by little we began to stretch the sentence by thinking more about it, and then adding more about what we knew. We WROTE what we THOUGHT.
The kids overwhelmingly agreed that the last sentence we formulated was the best because it was the most interesting. As writers, we want our readers to be interested so the goal from this point forward will be to "gumby" sentences in our writing :)
