Happiness Is...
What is happiness to you? What makes you smile? These are questions we should be asking our students and truly hearing what they have to say. Laylas Happiness by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie is all about what makes Layla, a young and spunky, girl, happy. The images illustrated by Ashleigh Corrin match the unique, fun energy of Layla in the book. This story is simple yet powerful and captures so many special moments for Layla. We see Layla outside in nature with bugs, in the trees. Layla takes us to her kitchen where she is carefree and eating her favorite foods. The colors and details in the illustrations bring out the true happiness inside Layla's heart.
Places and locations hold a lot of memories and emotions for students. They can be a great starting point for writing about what these settings make us feel and think. For example, the beach can hold so many fun memories with family and friends or the local ice cream shop can help us think back to ice cream sundaes with Grandpa. Getting started with a writing assignment can be a daunting task for many students but there are many ways to inspire our students! A great place to start is with what makes our students happy.
Next Steps;
Mentor Texts by Lynne R. Dorfman and Rose Cappelli is an amazing resource for many ways to get our students motivated and excited to write. In this text we learn about the world of Wordless Books and the power of images and the words and stories we can create from images. Wave by Suzy Lee is a great way to introduce wordless books to our students and practice adding our perspective of the story to the images. By going through Wave and creating captions or paragraphs for the illustrations, it will help spark creativity with writing. After this introduction and experimenting with wordless books the students can create their own as a group effort! Read Layla's Happiness along with Wave to get students thinking about places that bring them happiness. Ask the students to draw an image of that happy place. Next, the students will hand their images off to the person next to them so that they can start the story they see from the image their classmate drew. Using a 1-2 minute timer allow students to write a few sentences. As we continue to pass the images and the stories around between classmates the stories from those images will come to life and take a very creative course. This could be done with various small groups of students so that they feel comfortable with who they are sharing these images, memories, and writing with.
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