Scavenger Hunt: Examining Writers' Choices

Fourth and fifth graders were avidly scanning texts from Judy Moody to Moby Dick. Some were searching writing workshop mentor texts. Suddenly one child gasped and flung a hand into the air, waving the text with the other: “Mrs. Essenburg! I found one! ‘I could feel the spice filling my mouth, so I immediately grabbed my water glass’” (“Spicy!” mentor text*).

Others students soon found their own sentences:

• "She tapped on the cherry pit to give it scars, so it would look old." (Judy Moody Gets Famous by Megan McDonald)
• "But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets." (Moby Dick, ch 4, by Herman Melville)
• "All of the panicking made me feel like I had to go back to the bathroom again, so I went back in." (“Lost!” mentor text*)
• "I didn’t want to deal with it, so I decided to spend the day in my room." (“Home Alone” mentor text*)

What were we doing? A scavenger hunt for sentences where the author uses the same pattern we’d been examining. This is the year I’m experimenting with spending 5 minutes per class to explore the place where reading and writing meet, the place where we examine something a professional writer does, what effect it has, compare it with other sentences by other writers, and try it out ourselves. 

We’d started with a sentence from Sherman Alexie’s picture book Thunder Boy Jr.: “I once dreamed the sun and moon were my mom and dad, so maybe my name should be Star Boy.”  We expressed the pattern like this: “I use a comma and so to join two sentences showing cause and effect.” 

I’m following Jeff Anderson’s lead in Patterns of Power, which I wrote about in “Why Learn Grammar and Conventions” back in March when I was gearing up to start. I wrote about a couple of my adventures with the process in that start-up in “Staying Curious about Language” and “The Grammar of Swooping Swallows.” 

I’m excited to have an expanding set of tools to help students develop the ability to read like writers and write like readers. I'm excited to see how far this adventure brings us by the end of the year.

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*Mentor texts are from Jamie Sears' Not So Wimpy Teacher 4th grade personal narrative writing unit.