Third-Grade Photocard Project: Narrative Writing at Its Very Best!

It's one thing to read fictional stories. It's quite another to actually write your own fictional work as third graders soon found out during their recent reading unit, featuring narrative writing. However, as you will soon see, success was achieved, following a month's worth of hard work and the necessary literary instruction!

As part of this unit, students continued to pay due diligence to the importance of plot and its five primary elements, including the required rise in action en route to solving any story's central problem. At the same time, they also engaged in studying the different parts of speech and how those specific components then translated into actual word choices, especially with respect to description writing. The exact same sort of writing needed for this unit's own narrative writing Photocard Project.

In addition, students also learned the difference between "showing" verses "telling" when writing, and that it's almost always far better to "show" than it is to simply "tell". The importance of dialogue as a means of "showing" was examined, too, with demonstrations on the proper use and placement of quotes within their own work. Instruction was also provided with respect to the correct usage of quotation marks as well.

However, as is almost always the case, it was the study of figurative language that really grabbed and held the third-graders attention. Their fascination with any, and really all, of the seven forms of figurative language--simile, metaphor, personification, alliteration, hyperbole, idiom, and onomatopoeia--is clearly evident in terms of recognition when read but also, as you will soon see, within their own personal writing.

After scrolling through what once was a collection of old Christmas cards that have since been transported onto the iPad, each student was asked to choose a card that somehow inspired them in some way, shape, or form. They were then asked to write a narrative story centered around the picture on their given card of choice, making sure to use all of the points of study mentioned above. Not only were students able to gain a better understanding of the writing process itself, they were also able to acquire valuable first-hand working knowledge regarding the importance of the editing and rewriting processes as well. Once completed, each third-grader's work was then published using the Photocard app.

"Plotting" Right Along...

Whew, January just seemed to fly right by, as did our month-long reading unit, featuring the study of story plots. And who better to help students with that than world-renown British children's author Roald Dahl, whose lifetime wealth of work includes the following title selections: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr. Fox, George's Marvelous Medicine, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The BFG, The Twits, and The Witches. All read and enjoyed by our third-grade students throughout the month in conjunction with their examination of the five elements of plot itself--exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and solution.

Once familiar with these core principles and how they actually pertained to the works of a master storyteller such as Dahl--who lays claim to over 200 million copies in print--students were then asked to apply their own knowldege of plot in another way. Using "Google Search", each student was asked to find images that represented all five of the aforementioned components of plot. After locating all of the needed visualizations, students then chose between one of two apps--Animoto or Adobe--to create individual plot videos.