My first grade partners and I wanted to start our small moments this month in Writers Workshop so to introduce the concept we used a variety of mentor text to introduce our students to zooming in on one moment. My great PLC partner Ms. Cortez had seen these Kevin Henkes books with this idea and we decided to expand upon it.
We used various mentor texts to introduce the concept of zooming in on one small moment. We started with the book Wave by Suzy Lee. It's a wordless book but it's a great way to introduce the concept of how there need only be one focus character. As well as how you can stretch a whole five minutes of playing with a wave into a story. We charted each book that we read.
The second book we used is one of my favorites "Night of the Veggie Monster". This is also a great book for teaching zooming in on one moment. It also lends itself to introducing rich vocabulary and the use of descriptive words (but that would be another lesson!).
We began by charting the characters, the "one time" this story took place.
The one place this story happened, and of course the something that happened in the story. These Kevin Henkes books are great for this concept. They focus on just one character, one moment and one thing happening.
This is one student sample one of my students wrote. ......"Saturday I went to buy milk with my sister and she said did you lock the door Yes?."
Its a start! He has his one time, Saturday, his one place needs some work, his one thing is him going to buy milk and I especially love that he used dialogue. We will most certainly continue to work on small moments this month so to facilitate their writing I created a student friendly writing checklist for my students to use during their writing. I use it to help them keep track of their writing. Because we are a dual language classroom I created it in both English and Spanish. Both are available at my TPT store.
