Van Allsburg writing

After a (much-needed!) long weekend, it was back to work today. We got a lot accomplished, as the students worked on their Number of the Day activities in the computer lab, and we had a session of Daily 5 (where I noticed some excellent writing taking place!). Right after lunch, we had Writers' Workshop, and we read The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg. This is the last of Van Allsburg's books that we will read, as we are getting ready to wrap up our author study. The premise of the book is that there are 14 unrelated black-and-white drawings, each accompanied by a title and a caption. The readers are enticed to make up his or her own story, and this is a very popular activity to wrap up Van Allsburg author studies. I have done this activity with my students almost every year, and it's almost always one of the students' favourite activities. We usually do some story mapping (i.e. character, setting, conflict, resolution), first as a class and then individually, to assist the students in coming up with great stories. In the past, I've had the students do this activity on paper, before beginning to write their stories. However, I've recently found a great interactive story mapping website (which asks them questions to get them thinking about the basic structure of the story they will write), which we used as a whole-class activity today. We chose a picture from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick that none of the students chose as a picture that they wanted to write about, and then used the interactive story planner to come up with the 'bones' of the story. After this, it would just be a matter of adding more description and details, along with the author's voice, and you'd have the makings of a great tale! Later this week, we will head into the lab, where the students will each begin to craft the elements of their stories. I'm very interested to see whether or not the interactive story planner makes it easier for them to do this task than it has in the past - we'll keep you posted. Here's the link to the story planner: http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/storymap/