Later on, in Reading, I was trying to show the students an example of just one thing (using thing is also an example of what's going wrong) that's going wrong with their writing as a group. I wrote, for them all to see, the following sentence: It was fun and we ate hot dogs and my sister cried and my dog stole someone's food off their plate and I went down the slide.
I first read the sentence to them with no pauses for punctuation, because there were none, just that wonderful, magical conjunction and. Then we started talking about what makes a sentence a sentence, and that even if you write in complete sentences, your writing may still not be so good. As in: I love this book. It's good. It's awesome. It's great.
Back to the hot dog-sister-crying-dog thief sentence that should be a paragraph... I asked them to locate complete thoughts. They found 5. We started to separate them into sentences, but then I had 14 different authors and me left holding the dry erase marker. And eraser. These fourth graders were engaged because they started arguing over what made sense! WOULD a dog AND a slide be at a WATER PARK? Why does it have to be at a park at all! Why can't we just say picnic! A dog and a slide can be at a picnic because it may be at a park and also, you eat hot dogs at a picnic, right?! Well, fine, but it should be the Fourth of July.
Complete Silence. No one could argue with that specific detail. (I love these kids. This much thought went into my question: What does It refer to in the first sentence? What was fun?)
The Fourth of July picnic was fun. We ate hot dogs
Then they decided that for it to make sense, maybe the dog eating food should be mentioned up in this sentence instead of down after my sister cried. Well, someone asked, why is the sister crying? Someone says, This is bad writing. I can't tell what's going on! (Welcome to my world?) Someone suggests that maybe the sister is crying because the dog ate her food. Eventually we arrive at the following sentence:
We ate hot dogs and our dog stole my sister's food off her plate. (This led to discussion of possession-- 's)
Next, there was some argument over whether or not a dog eating your food would be enough to make you cry. Was this really enough? Students started debating over whether it was the very last hot dog.
Someone finally said, no. They will just have to assume either she had a very bad day already like she had a sunburn and got stung by a bee or she is like two years old and that's why she is crying!
(So... They all just agreed they wanted their audience to make an inference?)
The final paragraph went like this:
The Fourth of July picnic was fun. We ate hot dogs and our dog stole my sister's food off her plate. Then she cried. We went down the slide together because I wanted to make her feel better.
There was still some debate going on about how we changed the sentence. Some felt that it was absolutely essential that the dog be a wiener dog that stole the hot dog.
I collected notebooks yesterday. Many of them had copied the final paragraph (I had asked them to write only after we were done) incorrectly; with a lack of capitalization or punctuation. But I think they got more out of this activity than if I had told them some rules and they took notes, or if they corrected examples off a worksheet. They certainly would have never gotten to argue and talk this much. :)
