This year, I’ve been making a point to try new and engaging ways to offer mini lessons to my students. In my last post, I discussed how I used samples from my students’ warm-up writing project to help students elevate their sentences. My next creative idea came during homecoming week on “Barbenheimer Day,” where students were asked to dress as a character from either the Barbie or Oppenheimer films.
I started the workshop by showing a couple of Rebekah O’Dell’s awesome Mini Moves for Writers videos. If you’re not familiar with these, please check out her YouTube channel and see how you might use these short, informative videos to teach your students new ways to envision their writing. On Barbenheimer Day, we had just finished drafting some 100-word personal narratives for the Tiny Memoir Contest sponsored by The New York Times, and I really wanted my students to understand different ways they could use punctuation to create voice in their writing. Thus, we watched Rebekah’s videos on The Defining Dash and The Compound Adjective Cluster.
I’ve learned through my experiences that if I want students to use a move I taught in a mini lesson in their own writing, there needs to be some thought and reflection before returning to the draft, a bridge between learning the skill and envisioning it in their own draft. But again, I wanted to make this process exciting and fun for my students. So, as students sat in their pink satin or dark trench coats, I asked them to collaborate with their groups and write two Barbenheimer-themed sentences, one using “The Defining Dash,” and the other using “The Compound Adjective Cluster” on an index card.
The results were hilariously amazing, and also some of the best sentences I had seen from a lot of them. I decided to make this a contest and grab another staff member across the hall to judge the best sentences. As the judging took place, students watched another awesome video from Rebekah on condensing and pairing down information. The Long Story Short move slid perfectly into this unit since students were extremely limited on word count.
When the results were in from the judge, I celebrated the winners by reading their sentences aloud and rewarding them each with a small plastic dinosaur. Check out these stellar winning sentences:
From Marley, Faith, Avery, and Alexis: Today, I felt like Barbie—not your stereotypical high-heels-higher-hair Barbie, but your I-can-do-anything-sunny-attitude-president-of-the-world kind of Barbie.
From Myca and Martina: At the beginning of Barbie, Ken had that do-anything-Barbie-says attitude, but he changed into a men-rule-girls-drool kind of guy.
From Jackson, Noah, Max, and Caleb: Was Oppenheimer aware that he had created a potentially-world-ending, start-a-new-world-order weapon?
At the end of the hour, I asked students to take out their notebooks and reflect on the three moves they were exposed to in class. They were encouraged to consider which of the moves might work in the context of their drafts and how they might employ them in class the next day, when we returned to our drafts.
What do you do to bridge the gap between mini lessons and drafting and/or revising? What exciting ways do you teach your students new writing techniques? Share your thoughts with me via email at timmermanp@salemhigh.com!
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