RMWP Camp Day 8

7:40-3:30

Schedule:
- Prompt: "Authors are artists creating masterpieces with text. Who is your favorite author? Why?"
- Mini-lesson on transitions
- Short story with fill-in-the-blank transitions
- Introduction to Scholastic book reviews
- Write a book review on a new picture book for scholastic.com
- Finish literary analysis introduction and work on draft of first body paragraph
- Guest speaker: local children's author Cedric Threatt
- Computer lab: Type Scholastic review and literary analysis

Mr. Threatt is an author who lives in the Birmingham area, and it was a treat to hear him share with the students today. I loved the way he explained that many of his picture books are simply poems with illustrations. He encouraged the students to persevere, even if they encountered struggles in the process of writing and publishing. The kids asked excellent questions and learned about the option of self-publishing.

My greatest challenge of the day came when I was attempting to help some of the students draft the body paragraphs of their literary analysis essay. The directions in their packet are fairly explicit, offering suggestions for the organization of their ideas to support the thesis statement. However, many of them are still writing summaries and reviews. I am concerned that they are too unfamiliar with the essay format. I wish we had age-appropriate examples to share. I am not always a huge proponent of explicit and scaffolded instruction because it produces formulaic results. However, students also need to fully understand the expectations to be successful. Today, I found it most helpful to try to provide sentence stems for the students to complete.