After conferring with students, I've also noticed that many had one or more paragraphs explaining the main theme of their story. These paragraphs were also well written. When students got to the endings of their stories, however, I noticed they were brief. They lacked pizazz. I thought they must have lost their drive to keep writing or maybe they just weren't sure on how to make a suitable ending to satisfy a reader. Right then and there, I knew we had to have a whole class discussion. I decided to revisit a couple of those winter leads that I mentioned in another post. Underneath each lead, I placed two boxes. One box had a "basic or boring" ending written inside of it. The other box was labelled "Expert" and it was blank. I wanted students to practice re-reading the beginning of their stories to help them come up with a suitable ending. They worked in small groups talking and sharing ideas. Here are two exceptional endings!
My next plan is to have students re-read their writer's notebook and review their entries - focusing on the lead and ending of each piece.
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