Fiction for the win! (#sol23 Day 3/31)

My students’ writing year has been, expectedly, filled with ups and downs. So far, we’ve made it through personal narrative, informational, and opinion genre units. I have a thick collection of published books from all 33 writers throughout each unit, which showcases growth and creativity across the board.

And still…

I feel like there have been more moments of pulling teeth to get this crew to really dive into their writing – independently and fully.

UNTIL NOW!

This is our third day of our fiction unit and these young writers are so pumped about the characters and adventures they’re creating. They’ve whipped out more on-topic pages a day than ever before, they’re paying more attention to punctuation and capitalization because they’re super invested in the experience of their future readers, and they’re fully giggling as they sit at their spots and reread what they’ve already written to remember what they wanted to write next.

Here are some sample plots:

• A frog who likes to fly high in the clouds but he gets too cold so he really wants a flying scarf.
• A strong ant named Fred who lived in a mushroom but a 100lb. troll sat on his home and it smooshed.
• An old granny lives in a house that is evil and then she turns evil and wants to destroy the world.
• A cracker named Crackerson lives in a rectangle-shaped package and all he wants is to be eaten but he’s lost at the back of the cabinet.

Some years I have writers that live for crafting nonfiction books. Other years are stacked high with poetry submissions. This year, it sure seems like fiction is the big winner!