Grade: 3

Subject: Creative extended text

Length of Lesson: 40-50 minutes

Topic/Theme:Writing authentic text/ Critical Thinking Skills

Purpose:

Content to be covered

• develop critical thinking and reasoning abilities
• develop comprehension and response processes

The lesson will focus on the students providing an extended text of a narrative story. The story we will be reading, The Judge by Harve Zemach, ends with seven illustrations for which no text is provided. Children will be asked to provide their own text, only one or two sentences, to accompany these illustrations, requiring critical thinking strategies. This is the main focus of the lesson, however, there are many more opportunities for learning in the lesson. The students will need to use their comprehension skills of the text that was read, in order to complete their own extended narrative. They will have a greater opportunity to read; reading their own sentences rather than simple one or two word answers. Also, this lesson allows children to have autonomy of their own learning. This is important as children grow in their abilities, encouraging creative writing in later years.

Materials, Resources, Methods, Classroom procedures:

• story to read aloud: The Judge by Harve Zemach
• laminated teacher copy of illustrations with space for text provided
• minimised illustrations from the story, with blank space for students to add text ( 1 copy for each student)

Method: Read aloud session followed by individual extended text writing

Classroom Procedures: Both gathering time and desk work

Background Knowledge:

In Grade three, the students will have experience with writing, but they may not have had practice of writing to express their own ideas. I will encourage this, but I will also ask them to listen and think carefully while the story is being read. They will need to know what is going on in the narrative (comprehension) in order to complete their writing task.

Body of Lesson:

The students have been doing different writing tasks in class, but up until this lesson I have directed them in their writing. Today we will begin by going to our read aloud-grand conversation centre. This is a place in the class where we gather; sometimes for shared reading, student presentations etc. There are times when we come together to discuss perhaps the moral of a story, an authors style, or maybe what the children did, for example Christmas vacation.

This day I am reading aloud The Judge by Harve Zemach illustrated by Margo Zemach. I will discuss with the children what the Caldecott Award is and point out that this book was honoured with this aware. I will also draw the children’s attention to the descriptive of the narrative on the cover- “An untrue Tale.” We will discuss what this means and at this time I will begin to read. Part of the text is repeated every second page with something added on. I will encourage the children to read this with me, it sounds almost like a chant.

Although the text ends, seven pages of illustrations only follow. I will prompt the children to offer comments and generate some ideas for completion. I would not spend a lot of time doing this; I want the children to come up with their own ideas. At this point I will tell the students their job is to finish the story, using their imaginations, encouraging different ideas for endings. That is their assignment!

I will have the illustrations photocopied, with a text space provided next to it. I will encourage the students to look for details in the illustrations, and tell them to have fun! Write a lot, a little, depending on their thoughts.

Closure of Lesson:

After they have completed their assignment, this will probably take another Language Arts lesson. I will show them how they could create a film strip of a story, with illustrations and their own narrative.

Assessment:

Many assignment in our class require actual marking- spelling tests, grammar tests, math quizzes etc. This assignment was given to allow an opportunity for students to express themselves. If the students showed that they did look at the pictures, and their text related to what they saw or inferred. I would feel they had accomplished a great deal. Perhaps I would use a simple scoring rubric to determine the effort, the creativity and comprehension level displayed by the student to assess this assignment. I would have many other chances in the class to check on skills. For this assignment, I am looking for critical thinking skills, comprehension and effort. Much of my assessment would be anecdotal.