Freezing TimeTheresa Brown

North Star of Texas Writing Project

Demonstration Lesson

June 16, 2005

theresa.brown@gcisd.net

Students sometimes list events in theirwriting, instead of asking themselves

two important questions:

1)What do you want the reader to know?

2)How do you want the reader to feel?

Why Freeze Time???-It allows the writer to focus on a particular moment they are wanting his/her reader to experience.

-It helps the reader to visualize and really connect with what is happening.

-TEKS(4th): 15E, 18BCDEF, 19CDGH, 20C

-In one piece of writing, there may be more than one moment in which the author freezes time.

Without guidance, students will often choose topics that are huge and unfocused. Such topics usually lead to a list of ideas where the writing never goes beneath the surface.

Ralph Fletcher and Joann Portalupi (P.58)

-Good writing has a clear sense of focus.Ralph Fletcher and Joann Portalupi (P.59)

-An ineffective writer sees broad impressions that evoke vague labels; a powerful writer visualizes specific detailsthat create a literary virtual reality. Harry Noden (P.2)

Ways to Freeze Time:

Seeing

Hearing

Saying

Feeling

Smelling

Tasting

Student Sample

Student Sample

-This is how I write. I take a moment-an image, a memory, a phrase, an idea-and I hold it in my hands and declare it a treasure.

Lucy Calkins

-Narrowing the time focus allows the writer to go deeper into the subject.

Ralph Fletcher and Joann Portalupi (P.60)

-We need to let students feel the way writing takes on new power when they move from the general to the specific.

Ralph Fletcher and Joann Portalupi (P.78)

Now What?-Continue practicing freezing time, both in the first draft, but also in the revising stage.

-Play with time. Use the Writing VCR, as Barry Lane calls it. (Play…writing the story as it happened. Fast forward…to zip ahead to the next day or week or year. Rewind…to write a flashback. Pause…to zoom in with physical detail, or to climb inside the mind of your character. Reviser’s Toolbox P.105)

-Tie into Harry Noden’s brush strokes.

Final Thought…“When you write, your whole life is a stretch of mountains and you choose where you want to hang out. You can write one sentence and describe twenty years of your life or write three pages about one tiny moment that only lasted a minute. This is the kind of moment you’d make in slow motion if you were making a movie. This is the big moment, the moment too important to just let slip by with a sentence or two. You need to make the reader feel what your character feels. You need to pull the reader into a place, a time, an event. You need to make the reader swim in your ocean of words.”

Barry Lane

Bibliography-Fletcher, R. & Portalupi, J. (1998). Craft Lessons: Teaching Writing K-8. York, ME: Steinhouse Publishers.

-Noden, H. (1999). Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

-Lane, B. (1999). Reviser’s Toolbox. Shoreham, VT: Discover Writing Press.

-Calkins, L. (1994). The Art of Teaching Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Irwin Publishing.