If you have followed me for the last year, this post may look a little familiar. It’s come around to our “writing about historical fiction” unit, and once again my students are LOVING IT! I would go so far as to say that today’s writing block was one of our best hours of the year so far this year!
In a nutshell, this writing unit asks students to think back and reflect on a book/books they have already read. Whether it be a class read aloud, a book done in a book club (that’s what we are using…our historical fiction book club books), or an independent read, we are “digging deeper” into the text to really study key characters and key events and then to write about them.
As we read our historical fiction books, we “tracked our thinking” in our reader’s notebooks which is making this process a lot easier, but the simple fact is–they are writing about something they are an “expert” on because they know the books so well. The words are flowing–even for my reluctant writers.
The students are presented with a menu of options to select from:
