The Hamburger graphic organizer for writing

This week we explored the hamburger graphic organizer to help us think about a story as a complete item you might order at a restaurant.  All parts to your hamburger must be there when your hamburger is brought to your table for your meal to be complete (top bun, lettuce, tomato, burger, bottom bun).  If a part of your hamburger is missing, the meal doesn't make sense or is incomplete.  When we write stories, certain items must be there for the story to be complete or make sense, just like when we order a hamburger at a restaurant.  

We have just started this process of using a visual to help us monitor our writing for all components: beginning, three important details and closing.  Over the next two weeks we will use this tool for many shared writing pieces to help the students understand the graphic organizer.  Many students wanted to try to put their story on a hamburger and were excited to see they already had many of the components necessary for a coherent and exciting story.  A few students used the hamburger and noticed that they were not able to come up with a third detail and that lead them to revise their thinking about writing that story or to try retelling it again like a story teller.  I look forward to seeing the students expand their stories and make the more interesting using this graphic organizer.  Later in the year we will be introducing other graphic organizers to support other types of writing.