Big Audacious Question for the Day

Today, I had the chance to conference with a writer. I was a guest teacher in her classroom, teaching writing workshop (fiction writing) to her class while 15 teachers watched. Her classroom teacher listed her as the "low" student on the high-medium-low list. "G" had curly brown hair and a friendly smile. She was wiggly and in the front row during my minilesson, and I noticed her spark, so I was excited to get the chance to read her writing with her.

G read me her story, and it went something like: "There was a girl and it was her birthday. There was a cake with gummy worms and purple icing." Her work was filled with more invented spelling, but she showed a lot of sound-symbol knowledge (with the stand out being GUME WERMZ). 

"What's going to happen next? What's your action?"

(blank stare)

"What will your action be? Hmmm, who is at the party with the girl?"
"Her dad?" (in a tentative voice)
"Oooh, let's see... what will they do?" (spoken in my teacher voice) (You know that voice!)

G. is clearly not excited by my excited responses; she's looks at me pensively and I take her lead.

"Do you have a question?"

"Uhm, what's 'action'?"

Aaaaaaah.....

WORDS MATTER. Gosh darn it, what IS action? 

Thank you, G, for asking a question and helping me to support your writing today. We kept talking for a few minutes, using Mo Willems as our mentor. So, now what, G? "The dad is going to put a REAL WORM on the cake." G tells me she might even describe him as "sneaky"! And the girl, she might have a speech bubble when she sees that live worm -- I wonder what she'll say?

Lights. Camera. ACTION!

(Here's the minilesson chart from G's room today -- we were learning from Mo Willems :-)