From that small moment of time, students are writing short stories of just a few paragraphs, focusing on adding interesting details to stretch out those small moments.
See the example I shared with students here of a small moment story. Notice how the whole story covers only about 2 minutes of time.
To add interesting details to their stories, students are encouraged to add sensory details (describing what they saw, heard, felt (touch), smelled, or tasted) as well as the thoughts and feelings they had at the time it was happening. You can see in the example story where we highlighted some of these details.
Once students have added descriptive details, they are being asked to look again at their stories, sentence by sentence, and try to revise each sentence to make it even more interesting. See the examples in the story above. Some useful vocabulary for adding interesting details about feelings can be found below.
This is an ongoing project, but your child might want to share his/her current draft with you. If so, some questions to ask might be, 'What were you thinking at that moment?', 'What did you see around you?', 'How did you feel when that happened?'