Word Choice

“Who wants to go outside and smash some rotten apples?” 

Most students were eager to participate in this unorthodox request. 

“This is language arts, right?” 

“Yes, trust me.” 

Some wanted to hit, others wanted to pitch, some wanted to film, and some just wanted to be outside in the sun. The event was splendid, many great shots and many more good memories. The next day, I put the question to the students, 

“How do we relate this activity to writing and justify to the powers that be, parents, administrators, and ourselves, how this is related to writing?  

“We can write personal essays about our experiences.” 

“We can choose to write a persuasive argument in favor of using rotten apples and fruits to learn about the writing process.”

“We can write about our experience online using face book, twitter, or the schools ning.”

“We can write a poem about the experience to demonstrate are use of words, flow, and voice.”

“We can write up an opinion piece.”

“We could create a story book using iphoto as group project that would include many of the traits of writing.” …

Some students created a short video during their “tinker time,” of the events and we used it for a lesson on “word choice.” 

As a class we watched the video and created a post on our classrooms ning. The instructions were simple write one sentence describing, what it was that we did. From there we talked about being able to break up sentences and make them more complex and richer through “word choice.” They then wrote the their second sentence building off their first and then on to their third. All of this was going up live on the schools ning so that we could experience the process of crafting and sharing sentence construction with one another. 

This was a lesson that I used in an attempt to illustrate an aspect of the writing process through the creation of a shared experience that was used in our language arts class. This is one lesson that illustrates our pedagogical believe that it is better to have an imperfect something, than a perfect nothing. 

Travis Powell 


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