Our New Writing Teacher

Today I introduced the class to our new writing teacher.  Her name...Cynthia Rylant.  Cynthia Rylant has written over a hundred books for children.  She has won the Newbery Medal and the Newbery Honor.  To put it simply, she is an amazing author.  Who better to teach our class about writing.

Unfortunately she cannot physically be with us in the room.  So we are going to do the next best thing, fill our room with her words.  As we read her books we are going to try and learn three things about her writing:  What topics/subjects does she write about in her books, how does she structure her books, and how does she craft her writing.

We started off by reading one of my favorite of her books Long Night Moon.

We realized that she was writing about the different types of moon, we noticed how she structured her writing going month by month through the year, and we saw how she used a list sentence followed by a simple sentence to describe the moon.

Then the class went out and tried to write like Cynthia.  I was blown away by some of the writing.  One of my favorites was a story about someones week.  They borrowed Cynthia's structure of going month by month but instead went day by day describing their week.  The story was a perfect example of how a writer can stand on the shoulders of other writers.  I love this idea of "standing on the shoulders of other writers."  I heard another teacher use this phrase this summer in a class at Miami.  

I want our students to realize that by looking at the best writing of other authors we can experiment with what we find.  For the next two weeks we are going to look closely at our new teacher's writing.  Then we are going to experiment using her structure and her craft.  I hope by the end of the unit the class will be writing projects that give us a glimpse of what they learned from Cynthia.