We've been writing and publishing "books" for a while now in our classroom. Some students are very good at telling a story from beginning to end with lots of details. However, many are not. I got a story from a little boy last week that said, "We went to California. We got there. We went home." It was at that moment, that I decided I needed to concentrate my mini-lessons on the importance of adding details to our writing. Recently, I purchased Deanna Jump and DeeDee Wills' Writing Through the Year Unit 6. It is wonderful and has so many great ideas. One of the first parts of that unit is a lesson on The Whole Pie and a Slice of Pie. The idea is that students should zoom in and tell the most important parts of an event. But this mini-lesson, although fabulous, didn't really meet what I wanted to accomplish. So, I went to my fabulous teammate and explained what I was trying to do. We thought about food analogies- cupcakes and frosting, corndogs (don't ask-that one was a little weird!) and finally we came up with the chocolate chip cookie! The chocolate chips are the details in a story- they are the most important part of a chocolate chip cookie! Without the chips, a chocolate chip cookies isn't as good. Just like, without details a story isn't as good. So, from this came my mini-lesson. Click here to see it. I am kind of excited about trying it tomorrow with my kinders.