Lesson Plan
Three-Meal Weather: Food Inspired Adjectives Drive Organized Writing Using “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” by NNWP
Subject
English Language Arts (NYS P-12 Common Core)
Grade Levels
Elementary, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, 3rd Grade
Description
Inspired by Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the writer will brainstorm adjectives that center around food that might fall from the sky. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner foods will be brainstormed. Writers will then compose a three-part piece of writing that describes (with great adjectives) an entire day of raining food.
Website(s)
The Northern Nevada Writing Project
The National Writing Project
Six-Trait Overview
The focus trait in this writing assignment is organization; ask writers to create purposeful paragraphs as they create a descriptive story with at least three parts. The support trait in this assignment is word choice; writers will brainstorm strong adjectives before writing.
Author
Kaycee Goman
Picture Book Overview
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, written by Judi Barrett and illustrated by Ron Barrett, is the amusing story of the town Chewandswallow. This is no ordinary town with any ordinary weather. Three times a day the weather in this tiny town turns extraordinary. At lunch frankfurters may blow in from the northwest with mustard clouds and drizzles of soda. Judi Barrett creatively describes the intriguing weather in this small town throughout the story.
Duration
One 40-minute class period
Materials
Cloudy Graphic Organizer.pdfCloudy 1st grade samples.pdfCloudy 3rd Grade samples.pdf
Step-by-Step Procedure
Anticipatory Set: Ask students to think about what they ate the previous day. Ask them to write down two or three food items and describe them.
- Introduce the story Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi and Ron Barrett.
- Celebrate the powerful words (especially the adjectives) as you read the book aloud with your students. Pause frequently to record descriptions of food on the board or chart paper.
- In small groups, have your students read and respond to any or all of the student models that come with this lesson. The groups will certainly talk about the organization, since that's the focus of this lesson, but you might also have your students talk about the word choice in the writing too.
- Distribute the graphic organizer. Have students brainstorm adjectives and food possibilities and record on the sheet.
- Using the graphic organizer, all students should be able to come up with a three-part description. For students who can go further, challenge them to add a dessert course!
- Have students share their graphic organizer with a partner or as a class.
- Challenge students to write an introductory paragraph that introduces the reader to why the crazy weather is happening!
Closure: Ask for student volunteers to share with the class.
Extension of Lesson
To promote response and revision to rough draft writing, attach Revision & Response Post-Its to your students' drafts. Make sure the students rank their use of the trait-specific skills on the Post-Its, which means they'll only have one "1" and one "5." Have them commit to ideas for revision based on their Post-It rankings. For more ideas on WritingFix's Revision & Response Post-Its, click here.
After students apply their revision ideas to their drafts and re-write neatly, require them to find an editor. If you've established a "Community of Editors" among your students, have each student exchange his/her paper with multiple peers. With yellow high-lighters in hand, each peer reads for and highlights suspected errors for just one item from the Editing Post Its.
When they are finished revising and have second drafts, invite your students to come back to this piece once more during an upcoming writer's workshop block. Their stories might become a longer story, a more detailed piece, or the beginning of a series of pieces about the story they started here. Students will probably enjoy creating an illustration for this story as they get ready to publish it for their portfolios.
Content Provider
The Northern Nevada Writing Project: WritingFix
