My Teacher’s Secret Life

I was perusing Pinterest a couple of weeks ago and saw this really cute idea for a writing assignment from Confession of a Teaching Junkie.  She made a really cute writing assignment based on the book, My Teacher’s Secret Life by Stephen Krensky.

This book is about a kid who thinks that all of the teacher’s live at school and wonders about what they do once all the students leave.  I read this book to my class and used some thinking maps to help them make up their own stories about MY secret life.  We made a class circle map where each table shared ideas that they had come up with of things that I could be/do in my secret life.  I got everything from aliens to a fairies, werewolves and mermaids (must be my red hair!).  I used a Flee Map and showed them how writers plan their stories.  I filled out one box of the Flee Map, and then they filled out theirs. This helped me to closely monitor them to make sure that they were including  some of the writing basics that we have been going over thus far- transitions, main idea & details, incorporating sensory details etc…

My class LOVED this project and their stories turned out a lot better than our last writing assignment which was a lot less structured. Here are a couple of the final products.

Here I am as a fairy….

now I am a professional athlete…

and lastly, a mermaid….I promise I dress more modestly then this picture when I am teaching!

 I will definitely do this writing assignment again. Thanks for the idea and template Confession of a Teaching Junkie and thank you Pinterest for a lot of amazing ideas. If you would like to follow my Pinterest boards you can find me here…. I share a lot of ideas for all subjects on here.