"My Super Hero" Imaginative Story with the PLOT mountain

We love writing in room 201! We are always taking a writing piece all the way through the process --

Once we finish one, we begin another the next day! I always try to make them fun and build the kids up so they are so excited to begin. 

One thing I also do is try to always show the connection between reading and writing to the students so they can see that we are READING a book that someone WROTE. One way I do this is the week we are beginning a new writing piece, we will read a story that is in the same genre and do a story map over that book. Then later that week when we begin our new paper we use the same story map for our pre-writing. This way they see that their writing needs to include all the same parts that the book did -- strong characters, a problem and solution, a clear beginning, middle and end, an exciting plot.

One of the first papers we did this year was a superhero imaginative story. The kids learned about plot and the parts of the plot mountain. Below you can see the story maps I used. When we used these with books I just deleted the super hero pictures and title so it was just plain and could be used with any story. I teach two different classes -- both on two totally different levels. The first one is the story map I used with my lower class, much simpler. The other one I used with my higher group and has all the correct plot mountain lingo. 

**This looked alot better in Word... google drive messed it up a bit, but you get the general idea**

The day we began our paper I wore my superhero skirt and lightening bolt earring (I think I'm Ms. Frizzle...) and did an onomatopoeia mini-lesson. They were SO excited to use all the action words in their stories. 

Day one I let them choose which superhero they wanted to use for their main character. We did discuss how even though some of the super heroes resemble Super Man or The Hulk they couldn't use those names or the adventures they go on in the movies and books -- that would be plagiarism! They also began their

 pre-writing (see worksheet above) 

After pre-writing comes drafting then editing with the red pen and revising with the blue! 

After revising and editing comes PUBLISHING!
 The kids love to publish because they get to use colorful pens!!
Check out this post to read more about my colorful pens:
 http://terrificthird.blogspot.com/2013/08/third-grade-is-oceans-of-fun.html

I let them use the colorful pens to write their onomatopoeia words too!  

The paper was a success and a ton of fun!! Now it's time for a biography paper.... 

Happy Teaching Friends!!