The Planning Sheet
Once students were given the younger students' responses from the survey, we gave them a printed copy of this planning sheet. I added the planning sheet this year, since we had seen students struggle with it in the past. Here's a breakdown of the planning sheet:
- The first seven questions ask them to simply copy down what their assigned 5th grade student had submitted on their survey. That is meant to just ensure the writer read the younger student's information.
- The next few questions take them through the process of connecting those ideas (which are sometimes very unconnected) into a simple story. Some students had trouble with this, but I was impressed how imaginative they could get with just a little prompting.
- The last question asks them to outline the story. I assured them nothing was written in stone here, but it was important to make a plan.
I and the teacher worked with students individually to get through the outline process.
My plan was to have them start typing the story after the outline was done, but the teacher wanted a first draft to be written in their notebooks. I can see this group benefitted from that, so you can decide if a handwritten draft will be better than moving right to the digital part.
Making the Digital Booklets
I refer to these as digital books, but we just build them in Google Slides. I assign this template in Google Classroom, so that they each get a copy. It has two sections on each slide, so there's a place for text and a photo, like this.
Note that the first slide of the template has a place for a title page. I don't like them to take time making that at first, so the directions (typed on the slide itself) ask them to come back to that after they've completed a few slides. I provide these examples of cover images. Normally I encourage them to use Word Art, drop shadows and a good layout. See below about some challenges we faced this time around. Eye-catching title pages were not our main concern this year!
Preparing the Files
After students work through some drafts and revisions, they submit the stories in Google Classroom. I make a copy of each one and move the copies into a new folder in Google Drive. That way the teacher can grade the originals as normal, but I can polish up the copies so they're ready for the younger readers.
The amount it takes to "polish them up" varies quite a bit from student to student. Most times it involves some punctuation corrections and some wording changes. Over the years I've had to rewrite some or nearly all of some stories for various reasons. For example, one time a younger student stated her problem as, "Sleeping through scary nightmares." The older student tried to provide a situation about overcoming fear that, even after her revisions, would have been too intense for the young student. I get input from both teachers involved, in some cases, just to be sure sensitive cases are handled appropriately.
I also rename the file so it includes the younger student's chosen nickname. That's so they can easily identify their story, depending on how they are given to the readers.
On that note, I prefer to download PDFs of each Slides presentation, then upload them to Drive. When I have a lot of time, I then build a Google Site and link to each story. This was not a year where I could do that in a timely manner, so I just sent the 5th grade teacher the link to my Google Drive folder with all the presentations. She shared that link with her class.
Finished Examples
This first example is a very direct imagining of a situation based on what the younger student had stated in the survey. Here's what the 5th grader submitted
The second example is one of the longer stories we received. There's a lot I like about this 6th grader's writing, but the detail overshadows some of the main theme of overcoming obstacles to achieve a goal. The writer's desire to address the younger student's responses is still very evident, though, and that's one of my favorite things about this project. Here are the 5th grader's responses:
Conclusions
The additional scaffolds we provided (through question sheets) helped a lot this time around. The 5th grade teacher didn't know much about this project when I first asked if we could use her class as our audience. She was more and more impressed with it as we went along. She said her students loved getting the stories. It was a success in many ways, and I look forward to trying it again in the upcoming semester.
I do want to address some challenges we faced in bringing it together this time. The project started as strong as ever, but a couple days into it we had several students out due to quarantines. Since every student had to write for a younger student, this activity really needs 100% involvement to come together well. For several days only half the writers were in class! Getting the ones to work on it diligently from home was a huge challenge. Even a couple students who were in class most days were resistant to writing. This was the first time some students did not care to write for younger students. We are sure this was due to the effect the absences were having on the students in general. All their classes throughout the day were impacted by it, so by our 6th period class, productivity was way down. The teacher and I almost decided to forget the project and try again next semester.
It ended up taking several days longer than usual, so I was not in the classroom with them the final week or two. The teacher had students help each other to complete some stories. We never did get a workable story from those two tough cases. It was unfortunate, but given the situation, we focused on what we did accomplish. Two other students volunteered to write those missing stories. Their extra work and concern for the young readers was great to see!
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