Original Titles-6 Traits of Writing

My school uses the 6 Traits of Writing for teaching writing. If you are familiar with the ideas behind it, I'm sure you've created tons of your own lessons like I have. I loved these two books that I bought from Amazon when I moved up from first grade to third grade. I've also pulled some great lessons from the Trait Crate. 

As with any resource, I don't love all of the lessons or picture books that the authors present in their books so I end up picking and choosing the ones I love and then adding to them whenever I see another great book that just screams "organization" to me. I have ended up putting together my own mini-units so that each year as I get ready to focus on a particular trait, I can pull out all of the best lessons I have compiled and revised and I'm ready to go! Feel free to check them out, print off, make changes, etc. I hope you find the ones I have posted useful! I have a great unit for Ideas/Content as well but it is stored on my work computer. Just let me know if you want it and I'll post it after my spring break. I played around with linking the google doc. file to an image but it only downloads if you click on the words under the image. Not sure how to correct that but let me know if it doesn't download for you.

Organization Mini-Lessons

Voice Mini-Lessons

Word Choice Mini-Lessons

 One area that I have struggled with finding resources for at all is how to help kids pick original titles for their writing. I've tried all kinds of lessons including only writing a line at the top of the page and then going back to add the title after the story is finished. I've modeled creating my own title every time I model writing for my class-which is a lot! I have come to settle on the fact that this must be a developmental piece that not all third graders are really ready to take on. As long as my kids have a title that matches their piece of writing then I think that is terrific. However I do have a chunk of kids who can think past titles that fit and need some instruction on creating unique titles that help pique readers interests.


This idea just popped into my head one day so I typed it up and tried it out. I created a two column list of titles. Column one has a list of modeled readings I have used in my class this year that I think have original titles. Column two is my own ordinary version of the unique title-I totally made them up to sound boring on purpose, but still fit the content of the book because my kids have heard them before. I started by showing them only column two which was the ordinary titles and believe it or not, they weren't that thrilled to hear me read any of the stories. They said it was because the titles were...wait for it....too BORING! I knew I was on to something and I couldn't wait to show them the first column with great titles. They were stunned when they figured out what I did and admitted that the first column sounded much more exciting than the second column.  It got a lot of my writers excited to revise their titles and those who chose not to are still noticing the difference between ordinary titles and original titles whenever I do a modeled or shared reading with them and I think that is a great start!