Expanding on our story ....

As part of our whole class writing this week we used the school playground as the motivation.  We started with a whole class brainstorm using this picture:

On Tuesday we created our initial story.  The story began with:

 "We like to play on the playground."

We encourage the students to build on this initial sentence to make it better.  This is how the story evolved as the children added to it:

"We like to play on the playground, with our friends."

"We like to play on the playground, with our friends, in the sun."

"We like to play on the playground, with our friends, in the sunshine."

"We like to play on the playground, with our friends, in the sun's rays."

WOW!

On Wednesday (while I was at university) Michelle revisited the sentence with the students and they recorded a song version of their story:

The suns rays from Team 1 PES on Vimeo.

On Thursday, with Michelle away in a meeting, we revisited the story with the purpose of re-crafting a more interesting beginning of the story.  During our "days of the week" session we talked about now being in the season of "autumn" and we used this as the basis of our new start.  I gifted the students:

"On a summer's day, we like to play on the playground, with our friends, in the sun's rays."

Then I asked the students are we in summer?  No, they said, we were in autumn, so our story became:

"On an autumn's day, we like to play on the playground, with our friends, in the sun's rays."

But, we weren't finished yet ... one of our delightful children wanted to make a change and so our final story for the week became:

"On an autumn's day, with leaves falling down, we like to play on the playground, with our friends, in the sun's rays."