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Story Writing Mini Lessons

Writing that lives is like a movie which engages the reader. The only part of speech which moves is a verb. When we focus on adjectives writing may be descriptive, but it doesn’t create movement in the mind of the reader the way vivid verbs do. Most children come to school with a wide range of adjectives. This is due to the fact that pre-schools as well as television programming are geared to teaching mastery of adjectives. Basic concepts covered include (but are not limited to): colours, shapes, numbers, and sizes. All of these are adjectives. While television is a moving picture depicting verbs, it is not a medium being used on the whole to expand a child’s verb vocabulary. In writing fiction, poetry, and non-fiction the verb has become the tool of our times. It creates action-packed writing which is fluent, exciting, and not wordy.

An effective way of building a verb vocabulary is to combine new verbs with drama/movement. Teachers who take the time to build a verb vocabulary will see an improvement in reading comprehension as children begin to understand the action of the story, as well as wonderful progress in their written work. It is significant to note that Paulette Bourgeois, famous for her Franklin books, says in a video interview that she spends one to two afternoons writing a story and three months searching for verbs to make her stories come alive. All the language exercises in this book are based on systematically building and widening children’s verb vocabulary and varying their sentence starters.

In order to internalize a story writing vocabulary, the teacher provides word choices based on nouns and verbs. This systematically builds a written vocabulary rather than assuming children will intuitively acquire it. Structured vocabulary building is no different in language arts than specialized vocabulary taught in math, science, social studies and second languages. Many children will not acquire story writing language unless directly instructed. Feeding children exciting nouns and verbs draws out word choices they didn’t even know they possessed. One amazing by-product of providing word choices is watching students begin to independently collect nouns and verbs from their reading and apply them in their writing.

This book culminates in writing a story which applies the mini lessons and wonderful vocabulary students have acquired along the way!