Another Wiesner

Today we read another wordless picture book by David Wiesner. I love his books. He tells an amazing stories without using a single word. In this book a young boy on a field trip is taken by a cloud to Sector 7. Sector 7 is the factory in the sky where clouds are made. The clouds have grown tired of the shapes they are forced to take each time they are sent out over the East Coast. The clouds brought the boy to Sector 7 to design clouds that are a bit more interesting. The boy starts creating "cloudprints" in the shapes of all the different sea creatures. When the could designers see the boys designs, they are not pleased. The boy is sent back to his field trip at the top of the Empire State Building. When the boy gets down from the building the sky has filled with clouds that are in the shapes of squids, fish, and many other sea creatures. I love the idea of this story.

As we read this book, the class worked on asking questions before, during, and after they read. The questions the students thought of after the book were quite interesting. Since the students had read two books by Mr. Wiesner, they started to ask questions about him as a writer. Does he always write wordless picture books? Did he grow up by the ocean? Is he interested in the ocean? We are going to keep working on asking questions the rest of the week and throughout the year.0'[

In writing we continue to work on the idea of getting our seed idea ready to draft. Today I showed the students how I was working on a letter I had written to my daughter. The class had let me know they did not like my second paragraph (the feedback was quite harsh but I will survive). I wanted to show the class how I would work to make this paragraph shine in my piece. I put my writer's notebook under the document camera so the class could see me write two different ideas for the paragraph. When I was done with the two new ideas, we talked about which paragraph would work best. Now as an author I had some different ideas of what I could do in that troublesome second paragraph.

Then the class went to work on their idea. I loved seeing students working on certain stanzas or paragraphs that they thought needed attention. One of my favorite moments of the day was when a student told me he had worked on his last stanza. He now thought this stanza that was not his favorite had become his best stanza in the piece. Working on writing is hard. Finding those spots that need help and making them better takes work. Hopefully as we continue to work on this idea all year long students will find different strategies that will work for them. I also hope they have that moment when that hard work pays off and they see that amazing sentence they reworked make their writing shine.

I hope you are all having a great week.