Starting the Year off the Write Way! Day 5

It's Day 5 of my writing lesson challenge and today I'm going to write a lesson on Voice. I've been reading No More I'm Done by Jennifer Jacobson and buying several of the books she recommends. One of the books I had to have was And Here's to You by David Elliott (click the cover to go to Amazon).

Jennifer recommends the book for a lesson on word choice but I think it would make a great lesson on voice. This book is happy from cover to cover. The narrators salutes several animals and people with a happy, peppy voice. For the lesson I would review what voice in writing is and then read the book to the kids and ask them to describe the voice. I would then focus on the description in the book on bugs.  It says, "Here's to the bugs! The Leggy People! Bugs! Here's to the sting-y ones. The weird and the wing-y ones. Here's to the funny ones. The buzzing making honey ones. Oh, I love the bugs!" We would talk about where the voice is in the text. Then we'd talk about people who HATE bugs and if their voice about bugs would be different. Our next step would be to write about bugs together from the perspective of someone who hates bugs. Finally we would compare the voices in Elliott's piece to what we wrote together. It should sound completely different. I did something similar to this this winter when we were all sick of snow. I don't normally do prompting writing, but I had a sub. Here's the page the kids used (click the image to go to Google Docs):

Happy Writing!