Title – Class Fundraiser Story

By – Mary Kirpes

Primary Subject – Language Arts

Secondary Subjects – Art, Computers / Internet, Other-fundraiser

Grade Level – K-12

This lesson has been used in my high school ED and LD classes. Since the students I work with have no interest in writing and no ability to even write a simple sentence, I came up with this idea to help them understand how to turn ideas into a story.

Start with a simple concept of story by having the students brainstorm ideas. While they are giving ideas, write these ideas on the board (or have a student do so). It doesn’t matter if the idea makes no sense; write it down anyway.

This is where you have to be creative. Take these ideas and turn them into a story with chapters if you like. I take almost every idea and include it somehow into the story. These students who are never successful in anything are now able to feel the sense of satisfaction in a job well done. Even if the kids are very low functioning.

Sometimes students will not be able to come up with ideas at first. So you write the first page and read it out loud to the class and have them build on it. They eventually enjoy the weekly lesson time spent writing this story. After it is completed, we check it for the 6 traits of writing. My latest story is 8 chapters long and is a very interesting story about the end of the world as we know it.

Students are involved in illustrating the story and the final publishing of it on Microsoft Publisher or something similar.

We will sell our book as a fundraiser for our class.

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