Tomorrow I will be working with some teachers on using Comic Life with struggling/reluctant writers at the high school level. I wanted to model writing a piece of procedural text . So here is my “mentor text”. Read below to see what we did:
Great session today! Here’s what we did:
When teaching a new format of writing, it’s helpful to have student examine a number of samples first. I brought up this article How to Fold a Paper Airplane. Then I modeled using think-aloud to highlight some of the features of procedural writing. We then moved on to look at a second example, a recipe (one of my favourites!). This time I had the “students” (teachers pretending to be students) join me in pointing out the features of the text. We also talked about what the author could add to make it easier to understand.
Based on these texts I had the “students” help me create an anchor chart outlining the features of a good piece of procedural writing. We then discussed whether or not the features were “Gotta Haves” or “Nice to Have”.
(Keep in mind that each of these lessons are meant to be “mini lessons” of about 15 minutes, spread over a number of classes.)
We then moved into modeled and shared writing. I also showed the teachers how I used Comic Life to make the recipe above.
It’s nice to have sessions where you feel like you shared something useful!
*ahem*
Your procedure doesn’t include an explanation of “Comic Life”
I love this idea for using Comic Life. I will use this with my grade 5s next year. At the junior level I have also taken procedural text, cut it up and had the students paste it back together. I used arts and craft books. It works really well and helped to lead the discussion about what features help wit understanding the sequence. Thanks for the post. Jane
Thank you for sharing this, Danika. As I noted in current articles in my newsletter http://www.gecdsb.on.ca/d&g/feb09/misc.htm and http://www.gecdsb.on.ca/d&g/mar09/misc.htm, technical or procedural writing is among the most difficult. It needs to be concise and accurate. Used in a student context, it can be very motivating. I really like the idea of using Comic Life to support this. I’m going to try this out in the near future.
This is so cool – I want to get a copy of Comic Life for my Imac – what a great idea to use it for writing procedures – got me thinking for my 3e/4e
Thanks for the comments. No, my lessons don’t include any lessons on how to actually use Comic Life although we did some additional work with this in the session.
The teachers in this project have already been working with the program, and the intent is that students have been working with Comic Life too. The lesson is more about the writing form than the format.
Wendy, go here for the download http://plasq.com/downloads/
Royan Lee suggested I check out your blog. The recipe idea was great. Thanks for sharing.