Story Endings and Dedications

This week we started to think about story endings. One of the things I love about Nancy Carlson's books is the way she ends her stories. 

I thought they were all happy endings until I created this chart, and we started recording the different categories. I turned to the book Mentor Text and Google.

When my class  reads a book we can put the title on a Post-It and stick it next to the type of ending.

Story Endings

 The class wanted to put jubilant ending  instead of happy ending which was from the word work we recently did. 

Teaching story endings was an easy lesson to get kids to think about how authors use different kinds of ending. We did take a child's story and talk about how could we make her ending...with a wish or a surprise.

Click Here for Story Ending Sheets 

Story Dedications

I always read the dedication page when I read a book to my class, but I didn't realize until I did this lesson that some kids needed a lesson on why you write a dedication. I wrote a few of Nancy Carlson's dedications she had in her books on the easel. We had a group discussion on why she may have written that. Some kids were confused so I am glad I did this lesson.

At writing time we created some topics and brainstormed who would you maybe dedicate that story too? If I wrote a book about swimming would I dedicate it to my dancing teacher or my swimming teacher???