Lucy Calkins Writing Workshop - Realistic Fiction

Teaching students to write realistic fiction can be fun and so entertaining. To start the unit, I give each student a picture of a character to name. Then I have the students brainstorm the characters hobbies, likes, dislikes and even family life. Finally, we discuss how an interesting story always has the character face a problem. After a few days of writing, we discuss how we can make our stories more powerful with a strong solution. 

Each writing day starts with a mini-lesson from Lucy Calkin's Common Core and Writing Workshop Curriculum where I teach and model the expected learning outcome.