Do now:

1. Do now: • Write this on a separate piece of paper. • Describe your trip to school this morning in as much detail as you can in 5 mins.

2. Objective: Students will practice communicating clearly and detailed. Goals: Produce Clear and coherent writing at grade level standard. Initiate and participate in effective discussions with peers, teachers, and whole class conversations.

3. Agenda • Do Now • Discuss as a class why being clear is important. • Partner activity to practice communicating clearly • Look at an example setting • Create your own setting • Homework fill out exposition on the plot diagram

4. Writing Clearly • Please share your detailed trip to school with someone sitting near you.

5. Why is being clear important?

6. Why do writers do this? Writers choose words in order to be specific and clear. The more precise you are with words the more the reader/ listener can understand what you are talking about.

7. Let’s see how it works • Sit back to back with a partner • Decide who is a one and who is a two • You will both have a chance to participate in both roles. • The person who is given the picture must describe, as clearly as possible, the picture so that the partner can re-create it. • Make sure the artist does not see the picture

8. This is how it will work. • Volunteer?

9. On the back of the picture you drew… • Put your name and period. • Answer these questions in complete sentences: • What made this challenge difficult? • What was a clear phrase your partner used to help you? • What could have made this challenge easier?

10. Now let’s use this in our writing • Today we will be talking about setting. • First, let’s look at an example.

11. “All through October the days were still warm, like summer, but at night the mercury dropped and in the morning the sagebrush was sometimes covered with frost. Twice in one week there were dust storms. The sky turned suddenly gray and then a hot wind came screaming across the desert, churning up everything in its path. From inside the barracks the boy could not see the sun or the moon or even the next row of barracks on the other side of the gravel path. All he could see was dust. The wind rattled the windows and doors and the dust seeped like smoke through the cracks in the roof and at night he slept with a wet handkerchief over his mouth to keep out the smell. In the morning, when he woke, the wet handkerchief was dry and in his mouth there was the gritty taste of chalk.”

12. In your packets. • Please turn to the setting page. • Please describe in as much detail as you can the setting of your story.

13. How do you feel? Compared to my Do Now, I feel… • my setting is clearer and more specific • my setting is more clear, but I would like someone to look at it to make sure. • Unsure if my setting is more clear or detailed.

14. Homework • Now that you have figured out your characters and your setting, you may begin to fill in the Exposition of your plot map. (page two of the packet)