Weekly Workshop Lesson 4
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I love words. How about you?
Today we’ll be taking a look at words.
And thinking about their meaning.
All of the meanings of a single word.
Writing Quest- Word Meanings
This exercise requires your students to consider words with multiple meanings. Look for a few words and brainstorm their synonyms and definitions. Get your thesaurus and dictionary ready!
- Brainstorm words with multiples meanings onto a piece of paper in the Writing Quest section of your notebook.
- Look through a thesaurus– look for words with many numbered lines (see above). These will be a clue to find words with many meanings.
- Peruse a dictionary– just open to any page and see what you find. Look for words with more than one meaning that are easily distinguishable.
- Choose more than one word– so you play around with the word some and see which one works the best
- Make a word cloud– around the words you choose and write down the various meanings (see below)
You’ll want to consider how these meanings can be depicted through pictures because that is the next step.
We’re going to collage the word clouds.
Workshop Prompt- Word Collages
Some of the writers in your workshop might wonder where all the writing is.
Trust me.
Working with words and thinking about them is all part of the writing process. Get to know your word even more by following these steps:
- Choose the word you will display in your collage
- Find images to represent the multiple meanings for your word- you may find that as you search for images another word from your brainstormed list is better suited for this.
- Print the pictures– or cut them out of the magazine
- Cut them out and arrange them on your paper– I would suggest at least a 9×12 sheet of paper and this time I went for an even larger piece.
- Adhere the images– to your paper to form a collage. Collages are so fun when they are smashed full of pictures and words.
- Display your collages– the first time we did this, I displayed the collages for months. People loved them!
This activity is repeatable any time you want to slow down and do a word study. One of the best parts is seeing what my students will come up with. You can see here the words we chose the last time and how we displayed them.
Image Finding Tip– I put my word into the search bar and hit enter for search results and clicked on images. That gave me quite a few to work with. After that I typed in some of the other meanings of the word and clicked on the images. Play this out until you’ve saved all the pictures you want. Insert them into a word processing document and print it. Note: Be careful not to scroll past the first page of images. After that things can get unrelated and questionable pretty fast. Also, take care to avoid not so good search terms that may bring images you’d rather not see. Make sure you around as your students look for images.
Workshop Share Time
Ideas for sharing this week:
- Describe a Setting– Students can share the setting they described from the last lesson’s take home assignment. How do the descriptions make you feel? Are those places you’d like to visit?
- Word Collages– Have each student hold up their word collage and see if you can identify the meanings conveyed through the pictures. Did the student get all the meanings?
- Golden Lines– Continue to share your favorite books along with the golden line from each of them. Remember to look for golden lines in other people’s writing and tell them about it!
- Something new– a student has brought with them to share. Often students are working on something of their own that they want to share. This can be one of the most exciting parts of a workshop for the other writers.
As a reminder, making sure that workshop time is a safe place to share is the role of the facilitator. This is a big job if you want those reluctant to participate to engage with the group. Here are a few rules for engagement during Share Time:
- Only one reader at a time
- When students aren’t reading, they are the listening audience
- Teach feedback language to the listeners
- Encourage specific feedback for the writer- “I liked this moment in the story because…” is better than, “It was a fun story!”
- Share a golden line you’ve heard while listening- even jot it down if it’s something you want to remember. You’d be surprised at how many you can hear when you are listening for them.
- Early on you might stick with positive feedback.
- Add in suggestions for the writer later on when participants know each other better and are ready to give good feedback in this way and the writers are ready to hear it.
- Make a poster with suggested feedback- I pull it out when it’s time and go over it every workshop as we begin.
- Clapping is allowed!
- Ask questions- listeners can ask questions of the writer and often this lets the writer know what isn’t clear or what listeners enjoy.
As the facilitator, you may need to model this for your group as you first start out. Then I like to take a back seat and only interject with clarifications and encouragement when it’s needed.
Found Poem Take Home Assignment
This week your students will write a found poem. Here’s how it works:
- Make a list of your favorite book, movie, show titles.
- Fill as much of a page or more so you have plenty of titles to work with.
- Pick ten titles from which to create your poem.
- Place the titles into lines and feel free to move words and tweak phrases to get just the poem you want.
- Prepare to share your poem during the next lesson!
If you need title help and don’t have that many favorites, go to a place in your house with lots of books or movies and look for the ones that inspire you. Write those down. You can even head to the library or books store and sit among the stacks to do this activity.
Join our Weekly Workshop Facebook Group to see what other groups are working on and to see writing samples from participants.