Marc Brown Author Study

Each year, one of my favorite units in Writers' Workshop is always the author study unit. It comes after January, when the students are truly ready to be creative, innovative, and honestly just brilliant young writers. It's the perfect time to challenge them to write FICTION. We always write creative fiction, based upon a realistic problem that we personally have gone through. This year I chose to have the student's study Marc Brown, famous for the Arthur series. This author does so much of what we want our second grade writers doing: characters, setting, problem, solution, dialogue, transitions, details with adjectives. So to start this unit we got our hands on as many Marc Brown books as possible. We truly STUDIED his word. We collected information on everything he did and what we would like to try ourselves when we started our writing. We created our anchor chart to add to throughout the two weeks of studying his work. 

Then we were READY to write. Not just ready, they were begging to start their own fiction story inspired by Marc's stories. 

Our second grade team decided that our writers really needed to break down this writing process so we took it a day at a time. First we used a quick story map to plan out our characters, setting, problem, and solution. THEN we were ready to write our "sloppy copy" of our beginning, being sure that we began our story with a STRONG lead to hook our reader.  

The following day we were ready to draft our middle (the juiciest, meatiest part).

Finally, we were ready to draft the end of our piece, being sure to separate our STRONG ending just as Marc would do. 

We also took note of how Marc always used a blurb on the back of his book with a "hint picture" as we called it. 

Then it was time to edit and revise. We always use our "fix-it-up-marker" to make changes, additions, and subtractions. We laid our entire draft out in front of us to make sure our story flowed well and also to make sure we used transition words from beginning to middle to end. 

Talk about a labor of LOVE. Finally it was time to PUBLISH. The most cherished part of the process. Our final products were beautiful. I could not have been more proud of their dedication to this process.