You know how teaching writing can be in elementary school … the students just have a hard time really working through each of the stages of the writing process with full effort.  I believe they try their best with rough drafting, but they just don’t get the process of revising.  They are so quick to just read their writing over and then say, “I’m done” without adding any details or making any necessary changes to their writing to make it better (or sometimes to even make it make sense).  So, I decided to make the revising process memorable.  To prepare, I drafted several of my own personal narratives, which is what my class is working on when I first introduce revising in the school year.  I wrote a few drafts about experiences with my family (going to Jump, going to a high school football game, and a family vacation).  I purposefully wrote my drafts to match the kind of drafting I read from my students all the time.  You know what I mean, one sentence for each part of the story, not a lot of explanation, and with no transitions or interesting word choices.

I started our revising lessons this week by adding details that answer who, what, when, where, why, and how questions we had in one of my writings.  I purposefully started with a funny story about my toddler’s socks and pants being pulled down in a foam pit at Jump (you’d have to hear the whole story).  The students had TONS of questions about this story.  They just NEEDED more information about how this happened.  I wrote all of their questions down and then went to work modeling how I’d add the answers to those questions into my writing.  Now, when we re-read this writing after adding all of the details, they drew their visual images while I read and they totally grasped the necessity of adding these details.  Next, the students went through the same process with a small group of students to start revising one of their own drafts.  They loved it, the sharing and drawing totally caught their attention during this lesson, and their revisions were successful.  So, SCORE for me AND the students on our first revision lesson.

The next day, they’d been told to wear their best, most stylish, outfits.  You know what’s coming.  When they walked into the room that day, it was turned into a red carpet fashion show.  This was a really easy, free transformation (just some red anchor chart paper and I moved my lamps and seating around to outline the “carpet”).  I also had a Kidz Bop playlist ready for the show.  Our lesson today was all about adding more interesting, descriptive words to our writing.  I read another draft out loud to them before beginning and then shared an adjectives and adverbs t-chart with them on their chromebooks.   Adjectives and adverbs are a review for fourth grade, so I didn’t need to teach the vocabulary, so I focused on choosing more interesting descriptive language for our writing.  Now, we had the fashion show.  We hooped and hollered, clapped and cheered, and we got our groove on while walking the red carpet.  Meanwhile, the audience wrote all of the adjectives and adverbs they could come up with while watching.  It was quick, ten minutes maybe, and then we focused on our writing.  We started by sharing the words they came up with while watching the show to create a whole class t-chart.  Next, we chose a few words to make more interesting by finding them in a thesaurus and choosing some synonyms that would really catch our reader’s attention.  Now, we worked on adding some more interesting words to the draft I shared with them (some could be used from our t-chart and some we came up with based on the story and used a thesaurus to find more wow version of the word the students came up with.  You see, in my county, background knowledge and vocabulary tends to be one of our common struggles, so the use of the thesaurus is especially necessary for this lesson.  Again, just like the day before, now the students worked with a partner to add some more “wow” descriptive language to their own writings.  Again, everyone was excited about the learning, and their writing benefited from this added engagement.

We focused on adding sensory details for our last lesson this week.  This was going to be the big room transformation, and the students had been told ahead of time to wear their favorite sports gear.  I transformed the room into a football stadium for this lesson.  Everything for the transformation was either made, already available at my school, or purchased at Walmart or the Dollar Tree in the party sections.  I probably spent about $25 – $30 on this transformation, and with help, it took about an hour and a half to decorate the room after school for this lesson.  I found videos on YouTube of our high school football games and prepared a draft for this experience that the students would work on revising.  We’d already discussed sensory details in our reading lessons when practicing the reading strategy of visualizing, so I didn’t need to teach these details.  We were just able to focus on coming up with the details and adding them to our writing.  I chose different parts of the game to focus on and divided the draft into those sections.  We recreated the beginning of the game (the team entering the field and chanting), and then the students were divided into several teams.  Each team had their own football on the field taped out on the floor and earned yards for the sensory details they were able to add to each part of the shared draft.  You can watch the video that was made about this lesson here.  I gave this lesson extra time since the students were responsible for revising each part of the draft (their were six different events in the draft I shared) and we included a half time for students to get popcorn (thanks to our school’s PTA).  I have a two hour language arts block and this activity took about an hour and then included “overtime” for students to begin working on one of their own drafts.

For the rest of the week, the students worked on revising their own writings that they’d been working on during this unit.  You see, I’ve divided the writing process into weeks in my classroom.  So, the students spent a week in prewriting as many personal narratives as they could (we use a storyboard for prewriting personal narratives).  Then they spent a week drafting as many of those personal narratives as they could.  I use this time to have individual writing conferences to get to know my students and their writing.  This week was all revising and so they spent two days just adding the types of details we focused on this week and I used those two days to have conferences again to check on their progress.  Next, we’ll spend another week revising to work on transitions and leads, an then we’ll spend a week editing, leading to a week of publishing.  As we work through this process in the classroom, students are often in different stages by the end of the week.  Some will go back to prewriting to add more narratives to their portfolio as they finish working on the narratives they’ve written so far.  This way, all students are busy and can work at their own pace.  It’s not quantity that counts in my classroom, but quality and I make sure the students understand that before we ever begin.

For you teachers out there, I hope this may help you in planning your own writing lessons, or spark more creative ideas to add engagement to your own classroom.  If you do something else that you’d like to share, I’d love to read your comments!