Explode the Moment! Stacey Michaud from ScrapStreet writes…
One of my many roles as an educator involves teaching writing techniques to my third and fourth grade students. They often have wonderful ideas, but don’t yet know the art of storytelling. I remember when I first started teaching. It occurred to me that I didn’t quite know how to explain storytelling to children, maybe because I wasn’t totally comfortable with it myself. Luckily, we were presented with a teacher workshop that focused on concrete ways to improve student’s writing. We were forced to practice these strategies ourselves and were encouraged to share our samples with everyone else in the room. After groaning loudly, I jumped in. The task was to take a simple sentence such as, “I caught a fish.”, and SHOW what that meant instead of just telling. I closed my eyes and imagined what it would be like to do such a thing. I mentally put myself in a canoe on a river, froze the moment where I caught the fish, and played it back frame by frame as though I was watching a movie reel. I wrote and wrote with vivid detail. It was liberating! I would learn later that this particular technique, originated by Barry Lane, was called “Exploding the Moment”.
Here is an example done in three colors, demonstrating how a short piece of writng was “exploded” after two different peer conferrence sessions (inspired by Lane):
exam
I used this form with my class for their recent speeches. It worked really well! It is ...