Based on the the title, you might be thinking we are living in a world of rainbow and unicorns in 2nd grade right now. However, our world of writing is transforming from good to great with our Stars, Wishes, Gobstoppers, and each other.
You might not know what a star is in 2B. When we share our writing with each other, which we always do, we like to first let our author friends know exactly what we like about their writing piece. We call this a “star.”
Of course, we care so much about each other, so we want to help each other write the best possible story or paragraph we can. So next, students share their wishes. What is a wish? It is a suggestion for improvement. We read our partner’s story to think of wishes we want to share. As we read, our eyes notice ways to go from good to great.
To help us figure out exactly what is needed to take a story from good to great, we use our Gobstopper. Our Gobstopper isn’t the tasty candy you might be thinking about. Instead, this is a bulls-eye style graphic organizer that we make together. Each part of the of the gobstopper moves us closer to what is needed to write a great story. All of our story elements: character, setting, problem, and solution have a place on our Gobstopper, so we can pinpoint exactly which parts of the story we should keep improving and how to improve them.
Stay tuned, our young authors will soon be publishing some great stories with the help of our Stars, Wishes, Gobstoppers, and each other!
We can think about our thinking so that we can improve by fixing and changing.