Details Mini-Lesson

We've been writing and publishing "books" for a while now in our classroom.  Some students are very good at telling a story from beginning to end with lots of details.  However, many are not.  I got a story from a little boy last week that said, "We went to California.  We got there.  We went home."  It was at that moment, that I decided I needed to concentrate my mini-lessons on the importance of adding details to our writing.   Recently, I purchased Deanna Jump and DeeDee Wills' Writing Through the Year Unit 6.  It is wonderful and has so many great ideas.  One of the first parts of that unit is a lesson on The Whole Pie and a Slice of Pie.  The idea is that students should zoom in and tell the most important parts of an event.  But this mini-lesson, although fabulous, didn't really meet what I wanted to accomplish.  So, I went to my fabulous teammate and explained what I was trying to do.  We thought about food analogies- cupcakes and frosting, corndogs (don't ask-that one was a little weird!) and finally we came up with the chocolate chip cookie!  The chocolate chips are the details in a story- they are the most important part of a chocolate chip cookie!  Without the chips, a chocolate chip cookies isn't as good.  Just like, without details a story isn't as good.  So, from this came my mini-lesson.  Click here to see it.  I am kind of excited about trying it tomorrow with my kinders.