DCD fifth graders are honing their creative writing skills by crafting their own explaining myths. The focus of this project is on animals, using myths as a device to explain how they developed a particular characteristic. After reading several examples from this genre, students spent time brainstorming common animal characteristics to ultimately create a story about how it came to be. This group brainstorming yielded many fun and imaginative topics! Why does a snail move so slowly? How did the bee get its stinger? Why do dogs wag their tails? How did the lady bug get its spots? Why do cats hate water?
While the end product of this assignment is a fun and creative story connected to their readings of myths from around the world, the primary goal is to help students learn how to approach and work through the process of completing a creative writing project in an organized and productive way. Equipped with their graphic organizers and thinking sheets, students will be working through several key steps: defining the main characters and setting, determining what caused these characteristics to emerge, identifying other characters to consider in building the myth, structuring the sequence of events, incorporating a repeating pattern to the story, and then finally highlighting a moral to their story. Afterwards they’ll revise their drafts guided by a self-editing checklist to help them polish content, clarity, and flow, as well as check for capitalization, punctuation, and spelling!
DCD fifth graders encounter myths throughout their curriculum in both language arts and social studies particularly in their units on ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. They are discovering that the myth is a wonderful storytelling tool, used across cultures and the world for sharing common themes in the oral tradition to both explain natural phenomena and/or entertain audiences.
