"Your Turn" Mini-Lesson

Narrative and Writing Craft: Appealing to Senses

Hook: There are tons of ways to engage your audience in your writings! Today, we are going to read “Storm in the Night” by Mary Stolz. As I read, I want you to listen and jot down characteristics of the story that draws your attention. After I finish reading the book, I want you to discuss with your neighbor some of the characteristics that you listed out. Once they have finished discussing, create a list on the board of all the different characteristics they noticed throughout the book. Draw attention to how the author appeal to senses throughout the text.

This is a phenomenal mentor text to use when teaching about senses, but of course, there are other books you could use!

Purpose: Writers, today we are going to focus on improving our writings by using senses within our stories. Senses include seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, and smelling. We are going to learn how to include and identify these senses and then try to incorporate them into one of our writings in our WN to strengthen it and make it more appealing to the audience!

Brainstorm: Take a couple minutes to pull sentences from the text that appeal to one of the senses. Write the sentence and sense it appeals to in a chart.

Example:

Model: Model for the students a how to add these senses into sentences.

After students have practiced identifying the senses, show students how to add sensory words into text.

Examples:

“The cat meowed”. - The big, fluffy, orange cat meowed. (see)

“It was a normal day…”- It was a bright and sunny day as the wind blew. (see/hear)

It was a dark rainy day and the gust of wind sent tree limbs crashing to the ground.” (see/hear)

“The band played so loud that you could hear them a mile away.”- The thump of the drums and melody of the trumpets could be heard a mile away as the band played.

Shared/Guided Writing: Read a piece from your writers notebook. List the senses on the board. Next to the senses, try to come up with words of phrases that could be added into the text at certain parts to make the increase the sensory in the story. Ask and prompt the students questions to make them think. For instance, “In the part, I I stated that the water was gorgeous. What are some senses we could use to describe the water or the weather and temperature?”

This is a quick draft out of my WN.

When modeling or guiding students through revision, think aloud and ask yourself questions to exemplify how it should sound to them or what they should be looking for when they are working independently.

Independent Writing: Give the students the opportunity to work on one of their writings out of their WN. Challenge them to use sensory words to make the story more appealing and engaging for their audience. Students may want to include these sensory words on sticky notes and add them in at a later time, or try an alternative method to strengthen their writing instead of senses.

Reflection: Give students time to share with a partner some of the changes that they made or feelings they had towards adding senses into their text? Was it challenging? Do you think it strengthened you writing? What do you like/not like about it? Some students may want to share some of their revisions with the class.

References:

Dorfman, L. R., & Cappelli, R. (2017). Mentor texts: Teaching writing through children’s literature, K – 6 (2nd ed.). Portland, Maine: Stenhouse