Message in a Bottle

Fourth graders put their writing skills to the test and let their imaginations run wild as they crafted “Message in a Bottle” adventures this month. 

After several weeks of working on technical writing skills like paragraph structure, topic sentences, and creative detailing, Writing Teacher Mary Munkenbeck’s fourth grade students were ready to switch gears into a creative writing project. She challenged them with a writing prompt that had them stumbling across the classic plot device of a message in a bottle. How they found the bottle, what the note said, and its role in the subsequent narrative was left entirely up to the students. They were ready for the challenge creating vivid tales of adventure involving lost treasure, a mist that transports characters through time, and even dinosaurs!

During the project, Mary kicked off each writing class with a mini-lesson revisiting one important writing skill: writing robust dialogue, dialogue punctuation, proper paragraphing, showing instead of telling, brainstorming ideas, revision, and editing checklists. Mary challenged students to pay particular attention to that skill in their writing that day. “This was a great project for students to see that structure and paragraph skills are important, but they were also using their creativity, and the stories that they came up with are fantastic!” At the end of each class, students had the opportunity to share an aspect of their work that they were particularly proud of, whether it was a snappy section of dialogue or a great example of colorful description. 

Art Teacher Jane McGinty joined the fourth grade writing classes to show them how to draw their “message in a bottle” on a large sheet of paper that could be folded in fourths, allowing the bottle to stand upright and the paper to open, revealing the story inside. Students drew the three-dimensional bottles beautifully with illustrations that highlighted the tales of adventure within.