Story Plot Discovery

During our week reading "Ruby in Her Own Time" I had the students do a group "graffiti" type exercise. They each got a piece of large construction paper with a line to write the title of the story and then three spaces with labels of "Beginning", "Middle", and "End". I divided the class into five groups of three. Each person in the group received a sticky not with a job: "writer", "illustrator", and "speaker". The writer wrote on the poster what the group decided to write, the illustrator drew the pictures on the poster, and the speaker presented it.

This activity went really well! It was the first time I ever did an activity like this with real children (several times I did it as a presentation in a college methods class) and it was the first time these students had ever done it too. They absolutely loved it though! And they picked it up very quickly. We had a bit of a struggle presenting the posters but that is understandable since they have never presented anything to the class before. Overall, this was a success! We hung up the finished products in the hall way.

Here are pictures of the groups hard at work. (We had a couple students in special ed pullouts at the time I took these pictures so that is why some of the groups only show two students working.)