As a librarian, I am obviously a story lover. This lesson was all about writing concisely to avoid redundancy or sloppy writing.
We did a fun activity where the kids got to draw random prompts to base their story on. We did it over the course of 45 minutes total.
This included time to:
Define and discuss what writing concisely meant.
Do an example 5 sentence story together on the white board.
Have the kids choose their prompts (free PDF attached below)
Let the kids write a 10-15 sentence story.
Edit our example story together.
Set them free to edit their story and draw an image correlating to their story.
When editing our stories together we came up with a list of redundancies or unnecessary words to look for. I made sure to remind the kids that these are guidelines, not absolute truths.
Here's what we came up with:
"just”
"that”
“very”
“really”
"so many"
"a lot"
"because"
"and so"
"all of a sudden"
After the kids finished reviewing and editing their work, we shared the stories out loud. The combinations from the prompt cards really came to life. Feel free to take your own play on this, or if you have additional rules to writing concisely please let me know!
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