Composition topics & writing guidelines for elementary students.

Look What I Found!
I watch a lot of movies, especially ones made for kids, since my four children are between the ages of 1 and 11. I saw that in a large percentage of the movies, the plot was centered around something special that the main character found, and how that object changed the lives of everyone involved. Here are a few examples:
In the movie The Lord of the Rings, the main character finds a ring (and spends three movies trying to get rid of it!) Aladdin finds a bottle, a genie, a magic carpet, and a girl......they always seem to find the girl! In Like Mike, the boy finds shoes that make him play basketball like a professional. Beauty and the Beast allows the main character to find love in a person she never expected could have provided it.
I could go on and on; there are hundreds and hundreds of movies that use the plot of discovery as their main thrust. The prompt below and the planning outline on the next page are based on this fact. Allow your students to respond to this prompt and watch them come up with some very interesting papers. Some will use the ideas from movies they have seen, which is fine as long as they make the story their own, and borrow from the ideas, not simply copy them.
"Write a composition about finding something special."
Try this prompt with your students and see how they do!
  
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