Classroom of the week: Stacy Mucci’s fourth-grade class at Greenloge School

The writing workshop Stacy Mucci gave her fourth-grade students last Tuesday focused on a tenet of the craft: “Show, Don’t Tell.”

The main message was “Good writers show their feelings instead of just telling about them” – an insight that the Greenlodge teacher made easy to grasp, as she and her apprentice scribes worked to replace overused words with more expressive descriptions.

Mucci started off with this example of “telling”: “It was the first day of school. I was really nervous.” Below that on a large piece of paper on an easel, she had written some sentences “showing” that nervousness, such as “I had butterflies in my stomach.”

She asked students, sitting on the rug, to come up with their own examples. “I could hardly breathe,” said Stephen Holmes. “I could hardly breathe. Yeah,” Mucci responded, writing it down.

“I was biting my nails off,” said Declan Francis, who offered another, more age-appropriate phrase: “I felt like throwing up.” (“That’s the worst feeling ever,” whispered another boy.)

Mucci pointed out how much they could say about just one word. Using those examples gives a writer “a movie in your head – you have a much better idea of what you’re talking about than if you just said nervous,” she said.

In the next “telling” sentence, Mucci referred a time-honored source of amusement in New Hampshire: “I had so much fun at Canobie Lake Park.” She chose “fun” because her students use it so much. “I’m sick of that word.”

The kids brainstormed other ways to express fun, writing in their notebooks and conferring about sentences. “I was jumping up and down. I was anxious to go on the next ride,” said Maeve Bolotte, 9.

For the third and last telling sentence, Mucci pressed the class to elaborate on an adjective instead of a feeling: “My cousin just had a baby girl. The baby was really cute.”

She asked the students how else they could “draw this baby, in much more detail.” Bernadette Beatty suggested using “adorable” in place of “cute.”

“For me, I don’t think I’d be able to draw a better picture of the baby with just that word,” Mucci said. “I want much more description of that baby.”

After Ryan Flynn said “Her eyes were bulging up at me,” the teacher asked for another adjective before “eyes.” Bolotte proposed big and beautiful, and Mucci concluded the exercise by giving the baby “beautiful, brown eyes.”

Overall, Mucci recapped, “We want to try and show. Be more descriptive. When you are showing in your writing, you’re using good details.”

The students went back to their tables to start a new story, continue work on an old one, or revise by focusing on “telling” words.

 Mucci explained that the class was based on the Lucy Calkins writing program teachers were trained in last year – following the format of a mini-lesson, discussion of the lesson, students returning to desks to write, and finally sharing their work.

Caroline Barkowitz, 9, seemed to get the message. In her writer’s notebook, she reworked the sentence, “It looked like Katherine was really mad at Kalyn.”

“I changed it to Katherine’s face turned beet red, because I thought that was more of a showing sentence than a telling sentence,” she said.

Barkowitz, who was working on a fictional story, said she tends to go with her first-draft sentences.

“I never really thought about being more descriptive in my writing,” she said.