Introducing...JoAnne Moore!!!

It's my favourite time of year in literacy!!! It's time to completely transform the students' writing thanks to the brilliant JoAnne Moore from Calgary! JoAnne is an amazing teacher who has created a writing program. I attended a two day workshop almost ten years ago with her and I learned so much! 

We have started by focusing on sentence writing! We are targeting three main components of the sentence:

1) sentence starters

2) specific verbs

3) showing instead of telling 

Our first step is brainstorming verbs (action words - moving, eating, making noise) for a specific noun (subject of our sentences). We first chose the noun bear  and asked ourselves:

How does a bear move?

How does a bear eat?

How does a bear make noise?

We came up with a list of verbs and we wrote them in the past tense form (-ed): 

Lumbered, towered, charged, snatched, devoured, grazed, grumbled...etc

Once we had our specific verbs, we turned our focus on to the sentence starters. JoAnne Moore focuses on question word sentence starters: what, when, how (ly), how (ing), where and who.  

Here are samples of each sentence type!

(NOTE: The first sentence was teacher generated and the rest of the sentences came from the students independently.)

What Sentences - Using plural nouns we can drop the "the" at the beginning of the sentence. You can also start a what sentence using words to describe the number, shape, size or type of subject your sentence includes. 

When Sentences

How ly Sentences

How ing Sentences

The students are LOVING the change in their writing and are super eager to share their sentences with the class!

This week coming up we will focus on the last two types of sentences, where and who. Then, we will practice switching between each type of sentence.