My girl turns 12 this weekend and is in unit 7 of rev2rev. She has struggled with writing each unit even though she is an excellent writer. She kinda picks the same topic all the time....she is obsessed with kittens and dogs and animals in general. So I finally wised up. I banned those topics. She went from struggling all morning to produce even a mediocre free verse porm on a 2nd/3rd grade level (I mean, how many different ways can one person write about puppies??) to accomplishing a rather beautiful free verse and a very interesting prose assignment. She was so pleased to step outside her obsession, ahem, I mean favorite topic, and see where it led.
Her first attempt writing a free verse poem with puppy as the topic:
I had a puppy
That would come
To me
But when I left
He could not
Come to me
Again
Then with the newly banned topic rule, she wrote this about her bright red hibiscus
A bud
grew on my
plant
I saw it
Bloom
as a red
splash emerged
like a rainbow
of one
color among
the leaves
my flower
Ill try to attached a picture of her prose about riding a roller coaster. Ignore spelling. I did...that's a whole 'nother skill focus to work on
