Last spring, a student gave me a little stuffed animal otter, which my class named Eddie. A sudden brainstorm hit me and I decided to use Eddie as a tool for classroom management. "Eddie the otter enjoys spending time with quiet students," I announced one morning, and thus began the morning routine of giving him to a different child each day to keep at their desk, as long as that student remained quiet and followed directions. If a child became too talkative or showed any form of misbehavior, our fuzzy friend was promptly taken away and placed back on the teacher's desk, or handed to another student. Eddie truly has become an integral member of the Room 17 community. I know this because, if I ever forget to give him to a student, someone in the class will inevitably ask, "Who gets Eddie today?" This year, I've been able to expand Eddie's involvement in the classroom into the realm of writing. He has become Room 17's favorite writing topic. We started off by developing his character with a circle map, with me modeling my own: After thinking of ideas to describe Eddie, we then began regular writing sessions about Eddie in the form of journal entries. We call them The Chronicles of Eddie the Otter. I gather the class on the carpet, and explain to them about diaries and journals, and the format of a diary entry with a date, greeting, and closing. On chart paper, I do a form of interactive writing with the children, eliciting ideas for sentences we could write from Eddie's point of view, as if he were actually writing in his own diary. I even call on students to come up and write words or add punctuation themselves to a sentence or paragraph, involving them directly and physically with the writing. I encourage the students to think like powerful writers, using vivid and concrete details to describe Eddie's day. Here are a couple samples: As independent writing practice, I occasionally have the class copy a diary entry and illustrate it. They've also written their own individual entries "by Eddie" in their own writing journals, and each one is so different! We've only done five or so entries for Eddie as a class thus far. I'm very curious to see where The Chronicles of Eddie the Otter will take me and my students as we continue our writing adventures with him into the year.
6 Comments
shantia
7/8/2014 11:27:16 am
Thank for helping me to write my journal entry good one to use big THAKKKK
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Ms. Long
7/19/2014 02:41:22 pm
You're very welcome! I'm glad this was helpful to you.
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rangarajan
1/16/2023 04:34:32 am
superb this is helpful for me to learn english
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Atharva
1/18/2018 07:18:25 am
very good
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VRIDHI
5/11/2018 10:39:00 pm
THNX FOR DIARY ENTRY FORMAT
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