Six Word Stories: Book of the Month January 2010

January's Book-of-the-Month, as is the tradition, was an alphabet book around our theme - M is for Melody: A Musical Alphabet. The strategy that we learned was called "six word stories" - a story told in six words - no more, no less. The idea was to learn to write/ think concisely and to summarize. To teach the strategy the principal gave groups of teachers a picture and asked them to come up with six words to describe the picture.

Teachers were divided into grade levels and then subdivided into smaller groups. Some of the six-word results were serious and some were hilarious and irreverent, as is our school style!

The idea for the Book-of-the-Month strategies is that they can be learned and practiced by teachers as part of our professional development and then used in the classroom. This month the learning was obvious as kindergarten teachers Rachel Happ and Julie Johnson took the strategy back to their classroom and then represented the results on their standard-based bulletin board.

After explaining the strategy to their "K" class, the teachers gave pictures to pairs of kindergartners and asked them to write six words for their story. They revisited the strategy a week later and gave each table a picture. Each of the six tables got a different picture. The table group worked together with one child recording the group's answer on a sentence strip. Some of the results are below:

We saw a man sleigh riding.

An old house that is busted.

The dog played with the man.

A lovely beach and a bird

It is always interesting to see how grade levels from Kindergarten through fifth grade will take a strategy and use it in their classroom with their children. Kindergarten says this strategy is a keeper!