Student Handout
1. Are you the main character in the story or a secondary character?
2. What is your full name (first, middle, and last)?
3. Do you have a nickname? What is it? How did you get that nickname?
4. How does your name fit your personality? Do you like your name? Even your middle name?
5. How old are you? What year were you born?
6. Where do you live? Do you live alone or with other people? Who lives with you? Are the people you live with characters in the story?
7. Do you have a job? What is it? Where do you work? What are the hours? How long have you done that job? What did you do before? Do you like your job?
8. Do you go to school? What grade? What's your best subject? What's your worst? Do you like school?
9. How tall are you? What build (thin, medium, heavy, etc.)? How much do you weigh?
What color is your hair? Your eyes?
10. Are you rich, poor, or average? Does it matter to you whether or not you have money?
11. Which three of the following traits best describe you:
angry artistic bold bubbly careful cheerful clumsy confused critical curious
detached dreamer dull energetic enthusiastic frantic frustrated funny fussy generous
good-natured graceful hard-working imaginative intellectual intelligent lazy lonely loud loyal
messy neat organized outgoing powerful practical quiet realistic relaxed serious
shy snobbish sympathetic tense
thoughtful tight-fisted timid tough unhappy worried 12. What would you most like to have?
13. What is your biggest pet peeve?
14. What do other people always tell you about yourself?
15. What is the best thing about you? The worst?
16. When are you happiest?
17. Choose any three of your answers and write two or three paragraphs explaining those answers.
From Teaching Writing in Middle School. © 1998 Beth Means and Lindy Lindner. Teacher Ideas Press. (800) 237-6124.
50 ^ ^ 2—Planning
Activity 7:
Making a Pictionary
Thought itself needs words. It runs on them like beads on a string.
—Ugo Betti
The old tradition of handing out a list of vocabulary words for students to use in their stories doesn't work when every student is writing a different piece. It's just as well. The vocabulary never helped that much anyway. It's hard enough to think of a story without having to use certain words to tell it.
Making a pictionary is fun, but more important, it helps students collect vocabulary related to their pieces. It's easy to do: Draw a picture of the subject, setting, characters, or anything else related to the piece and label all the components of the picture with words.
Students can use a professional pictionary, such as a What's What (try the one by Reginald Bregonier and David Fisher) to look up more words for their pictures. For the inartistic,
"stick" pictures on notebook paper work as well as fancy drawings. For the artistic, this activity may peak their interest in writing.
Instructions to Students
What's a pictionary? It's a dictionary of pictures that includes all the words for every- thing in the pictures. Making a pictionary helps you write because you learn words you need for your story before you begin. Making a pictionary is simple. Draw a picture of something in your story: the subject, your characters, or the setting. Label everything in the picture with words. Make a list of all the words in the picture below your drawing.
There is a book on the reference shelf called What's What. It's a pictionary, too, about all sorts of subjects. You can look in it for ideas of more words you might need for your story and add them to your list. If you don't know how to spell a word, look up the correct spelling before you write it in your pictionary. This is a good place to use The Misspeller's Dictionary, which lists words by common misspellings.
EXAMPLE
Pictionary 1.
Part 2: Background Research ^ ^ ^ 51 EXAMPLE
Pictionary 2,
Activity 8:
Making a Verbiary
Words should be an intense pleasure, just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
—Evelyn Waugh
A good rule of style is: Never use an adverb when a good strong verb will do. Verbs are the heart of the English sentence. The language makes up for its weak conjugation by a flexible use of verbs and a big vocabulary of verbs. A good vocabulary of verbs is the most important vocabulary for students to develop.
Making a verbiary helps students list verbs they can use, but more important, it imitates what they must do to think of verbs when they are writing. Although it's good practice, making a verbiary is not an easy exercise. Show students how to do it before they begin, and circulate from table to table to help fill in any missing vocabulary.
Depending on the sophistication of the class, this exercise may provide an opportunity to discuss how English verbs work. For example, students may encounter verb phrases where another word becomes an essential part of the verb. "Famine drove up the price of wheat"
and "The tour bus drove up the road" both use "up" as part of the verb, and the verb phrase has two different meanings, just as a single verb may have. Even if you don't discuss verbs in this fine detail, have students list both the verb and the verb phrase on their lists. This will become important later when they begin using the lists to look up synonyms for the verbs.
Instructions to Students
In case you've forgotten, nouns are the words for people, places, and things. Verbs are the action of a sentence. They are what those people, places, and things do—even if they just sit there. In the sentence "The dog jumped over the house," dog is a noun and jumped is a verb.
Look at the list of words from your pictionary. Most of them are nouns, aren't they? Today we're going to make a verbiary to go with your pictionary, just to make sure you've got plenty of verbs on hand for your story.
Sit with your writing groups today. We'll show you how to do this once before you try it on your own. The handout will help you remember the steps.
52 f-'5^ 2—Planning