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Collaborative Project: Teaching Writing With Touchstone Books
Mrs. Greenwald’s Third Grade Quest for Knowledge students |
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| Touchstone Books: Alphabet Acrostic Books by Steven Schnur and others |
Writing Craft: Acrostic
poems |
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Books and Resources:
We started out by doing a K-W-L about the subject of chocolate. We realized quickly that although many of us enjoy chocolate, we don’t know very much about its “who, what, where, when, why, or how.” We decided that it would be a good idea to read some books to find out more. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was chosen. It’s a fun read and familiar to the students because of the movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. After reading and discussing the book (and how it differs
from the movie), we decided we were really interested in the subject, but
still didn’t have too many answers to our original questions. We read
Chocolate: Riches from the Rainforest together. We then investigated the
Exploratorium website and learned a lot more. We also read the book
Rainforest Secrets to get some background information on the source of
chocolate. Now we were ready to fill in the L on the K-W-L. We even needed
an extra sheet of paper for our notes of what we learned about chocolate. We began by collaborating on an acrostic of my name and one of the students’ classroom teacher. The students were eager to try an acrostic of their own names. Dictionaries and thesauri in hand, each student wrote a poem about himself or herself and shared them with the group. Finally, each student created an acrostic poem to share his
or her new information about chocolate. Of course, we then presented them to
each other along with our favorite forms of our research topic.
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After much discussion and enthusiasm, we started to think about how we would
demonstrate what we learned in our research. Since we have been writing
poetry all year, an acrostic seemed like a good idea. We pair read the
acrostic books about the seasons. Then we shared any new information we
found from the books. Now it was time to try out writing an acrostic.