Short Story Writing...

This week we have been exploring how to write effective and captivating short stories.  We have been focusing on the story THE HITCHHIKER by Roald Dahl.

On Monday we discussed why Roald Dahl is such and effective writer.  We decided as a whole class that he is an incredible character writer.We explored some of the mad and evil characters that he has created through out his career... Mr and Mrs Twit, Aunt Sponge, Grand high witch, E

On Tuesday Ms Berry read us the first page of his short story 'The Hitchhiker', stopping at the point where the car pulls up to the interesting traveler.   We each got a copy  to read, next we had to highlight all of the descriptive imagery he used.  After this we had to think of our own dream vehicle and mirror the story using different imagery, a different car and our own character.  We began to draft our own Hitchhiker story.

Today during literacy we started the day in small co-operative groups.  Each group was given an A1 piece of card and a vivid.  There was a picture of a different hitchhiker on each groups card.  We all had 30 minutes to brainstorm all of the things we could based on four main categories

1: His face

2: his appearance

3: His gear

4: his posture and movements

Once we had completed this we came together as a whole class to present our ideas.

Now we have many wonderful descriptions, similes, metaphors, adjectives, adverbs and emotive imagery which will be up on our 'word smith wall'.  These ideas will help us use really exciting words, phrases and imagery in our own Hitchhiker writing.

Tomorrow we will continue to draft and conference our short stories.  Ms Berry gives us feedback and feed-forward when we share our work by writing on sticky notes as we read them to the class, and sticking.  We then use the suggestions on the stickies to make our writing even more effective!