The 6 Traits of Writing encourages teachers to use picture books to help students generate ideas and details. For practice in narrative writing, we read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, then used it as a spring board for the students’ individual writing.
http://educationnorthwest.org/traits (Official website of the 6 Traits)
Here is the writing prompt and outline I gave my students. You can see that the student has quite a terrible day to write about. But it was his second point that had me laughing:
Cheetah print? The known calling card of a skank, even to 7th graders! I gave him an A.
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