Which is a more interesting sentence to read?

I like music.

or

"Counting Stars" faded in on the radio so I reached over to turn it up.  I smiled and began singing and dancing in my seat while passengers in the other cars looked on with furrowed brown in confusion.
​

We are in our first week of writing speeches.  I know...speeches...terrifying business.  

We have been working in class on rough copies of introduction paragraphs and the first major point they are going to be talking about so far.  Students are welcome to write ahead of the pace we are setting in class (and are going to be expected to work on speeches at home, as well), but we are breaking the speeches down into manageable pieces day by day.  

Each time we have a new part of their speech ready to revise, we do an 'author's mumble' to ourselves to find those easy-to-miss-while-we-read-in-our-heads mistakes.  This is exactly what it sounds like - very quietly reading to themselves out loud, just loud enough to hear their own voices.

Once the author's mumble is complete, students are asked to pair up and read/revise with their partner.  They sit EEKK (elbow to elbow, knee to knee) and read their work out to their partner in turns.  The partner who is not reading out loud is actively listening and reading along with the partner doing the speaking.  Once the first person finishes reading through their work, they read through again and 'RADaR' the writing:

Replace

• words that are not specific
• words that are overused
• sentences that are unclear

Add

• new information 
• descriptive adjectives and adverbs
• rhetorical or literary devices

Delete

• unrelated ideas
• sentences that sound good creatively but create unity problems
• unwanted repetition
• unnecessary details

and Reorder

• to make better sense or to flow better
• so details support main ideas

Students are given time to do this with both pieces of writing.  During the process, they are asked to give each other genuine feedback and ask questions they might have had about their partner's work.

Praise - things that they a=particularly liked about their partner's work and why

Question - about what their partner wrote or questions about the writer has for the reviewer

Suggest - what could they do to make their writing better or more detailed?


As we get deeper and deeper into this project that will span over the transition between Term 2 and Term 3, please encourage your child to work on their speech at home and to practice in front of you.  Revise with them, encouraging them to use the 

A colleague showed a group of us teachers a nifty website while we were at an after-school professional development session this past week.  You can add descriptive words to the sentences to make them more interesting, then use the sentences you have created as a jumping-off-point to start a story.  Give it a try!

Down With Boring Sentences!