Brandi J. Clark

How do I  help students improve their story endings?

Story endings tend to fall flat for many students.

Endings are part of the planning process before the writing begins.

Students are taught to have a character, a setting, a problem and a solution.

The ending comes after the solution.

The ending is a statement about the solution, addressing the problem.

An ending is an extra statement or a section of the text.

For example, if the problem in the story was a lost cat and the solution was to put out tuna to lure the cat home, the ending might be a comment about not letting the cat out again or getting a leash for the cat.

The ending ties up the story, it is not the solution but a commentary on what has happened in the story.

Endings can be written as a lesson learned, “I will never go into haunted houses again, or at least not without my dog.”

Endings can be an extension of time, “Later that year I saw Franny at a soccer game, we waved at each other, but our friendship will never be the same.”

Endings can have a twist, “After I found the treasure, I lost interest in the map. It wasn’t until September, when I opened my math textbook and a coin fell out, and a familiar voice said, We want it back. All of it. I looked around the classroom to see if any one heard. The problem was my classmates were gone and the room was a ship. A panic rushed in, here we go again!”

How do other stories end? Find out!

Search through your classroom library and keep a growing list with the students.

As usual, let me know how it goes 🙂

THE END

This post is the start of a new series of posts where I answer the questions that teachers often ask me.

Today’s Question:

How do I get students to add periods in the right places?

First, make sure that you taught students what a sentence is. I found a lovely video to illustrate this.

Here is where the trouble starts.

Notice in the video, there are only short sentences with a period, question mark or exclamation mark placed at the end of a sentence, always on the right hand side of the video.

When students see these examples, they think of periods as having a location on the page.

This is because students are first exposed to sentences as beginning and ending on one line.

• their early leveled readers have short sentences, beginning and ending on one line
• teachers model short sentences beginning and ending on one line
• students write short sentences, beginning and ending on one line

They see periods as going “at the end”, rather than at the end of a group of words wherever that happens to be on the page. See below.

It has happened to me too.

I have asked students to add periods and they come back with something like this.  See below.

There is not a sense of sentence but rather a sense of location, they think a period goes at the end of a line.

How do you solve this issue?

Model for students sentences that go onto the second line. In other words, demonstrate for the students how to wrap the text.

Wrapping the text means to start the sentence on one line and continue onto the next line where the period is added. See below.

When students see sentences wrapped across two lines, they begin to understand that periods are added at the end of a sentence not at the end of a line.

Students need to know when one sentence ends, another begins.