The Life of a Shoe

I just had one of the best writing classes in my 3 years of teaching and it was all thanks to a few shoes! I found the lesson idea in a book called Trait-Based Mini-Lessons for Teaching Writing in Grades 2-4, written by Megan Sloan. I have really enjoyed this resource and find many of the lessons work well with my students. Since we are focusing on Voice, I used Megan Sloan's suggestion of using shoes as a writing prompt. Well, when I brought out a bag of shoes and began pulling them out, my student's lite up. They immediately were engaged in the dialogue and offered many great ideas about where the show could have been as well as the shoe's life struggles and joys. It was a great conversation as we pretended to have the shoes talk to one another about their life. 
Following this, each of my students picked a shoe and wrote a paragraph from the perspective of the shoe. I encouraged each student to really focus on their voice as a writer. The end results were fantastic and showed excellent progress for some of my struggling writers.