Fiction… with a twist!

Twist

This week, I have taken five groups of Stage 3 students – about twelve students per group per afternoon, for 30 minute lessons – through an orientation of Fiction with a twist, compared and contrasted the online sample student introductory biographies and the fictional character sketches, then I set the paragraph writing for “Voice” as homework. All between packing up the library for six months of rebuilding. Eeek!

On Monday, the first group returns to share their writing, and/or complete it, and/or enter it onto the blog. I’m figuring that some students will turn up to rap next week, empty-handed. That’s okay, they can write while others type into Word. But each group went off, this week, fairly confident that they could write a bio (noting that each online samples had at least one humorous sentence in the paragraph) and a fictional character sketch. They were amazed to note that each writer had mentioned hair – and so my students began thinking about what they noticed whenever a new colleague arrived at school, ie. was hairstyle really one of the first things we note about a new face?

Fiction with a twist is a blogging project coordinated by NSW DET’s Libraries and Information Literacy Unit. It’s aimed at gifted readers and writers in Stage 3 and 4, but can be used with any students of those Stages. Authors John Larkin, Deb Abela and James Roy will be reading and responding to the students’ writing. The only compulsory weekly task is the paragraph writing task – everything else is optional and flexible!