I NEED EXAMPLES! GIVING POINTS :)! Focus on one moment: Describe in detail your one chosen moment from a time you were finally able to do something you’d never been able to do before. Zoom in on that moment and write at least five detailed sentences about it.

Some details to include are:

What did you do?
How did you feel?
What did you say or think?
What did your body look like?
What did you notice about what other people did or said?

One year when I was teaching fifth grade I thought it would be a great idea to end our literature genre

study of mysteries by having the students write a mystery of their own. After six weeks of planning,

conferencing, drafting, editing, drafting, editing, conferencing, editing, re-writing, drafting, planning, drafting,

editing, I was ready to kilol myself. I could see the headlines: REAL LIFE MYSTERY: TEACHER DI

TEACHING MYSTERY UNIT I didn’t literally killo myself, but the amount of work involved did kilol a small

part of my brain. In the end, the mysteries were written, most of them anyway, but I think I wrote huge sections

for some students. Most of the mysteries made no sense and they were either way, way, way too long (18

chapters in one case) or way, way, way too short (4 paragraphs). I vowed I would never do it again.

The next year, new fifth graders arrived in my classroom asking, “Are we going to get to write

mysteries like last year’s class? My friend said it was her favorite part of the year!” Sadly, I realized I needed

to do it again. But I needed to do it differently. Students needed a structure, and they needed more practice on

the sub-skills of writing. Since they had been reading mostly novels, they needed to understand what a SHORT

mystery might look like. They needed a model of a five-chapter mystery in which each chapter was about two

double-spaced pages. The whole thing would be total of about 10 double-spaced pages! Once I figured out the

structure, the rest was easy — well, not easy, but much, much more manageable.

That mystery unit taught me more than it taught the students. I learned that when teaching writing —

the creative process is helped by structure. Many authors use a structure to guide their writing and this recipe or

formula is not inherently a bad thing. Also, I learned that this structure can apply to the overall plan or arc of a

piece of writing but it also works for the structure of individual scenes or sent

touch the rim

Explanation:

what i did - practiced every day

how i felt - awesome

what i thought and said - man i have to tell my friends

my body looked like i was flying

i noticed that other people was thinking man he finally did it and they were saying good job bro

summer because you get to tan and wear cooler clothes and go to the beach