Me Too! and The Escape of Marvin the Ape Writing Lessons

These lessons are exactly like my No David Writing Lesson that I wrote about early.  Both Me Too! by Mercer Mayer and The Escape of Marvin the Ape by Caralyn and Mark Buehner are cute picture books that contain a lot of little events but very little detail about each event.  


After reading either book, you could ask children to choose one event from either story and then revise what was in the book by adding more detail.  Students could explode the moments, add dialogue, or add thought shots.  (I wish I could give proper credit for those revision ideas but I don't remember which teaching book I read them in.  I would guess Ralph Fletcher.  He's awesome!)


This kind of activity makes for a nice prompt write because it provides students with a variety of main ideas to choose from instead of just one topic.  Also, students don't have to come up with the seed idea (Lucy Calkins), they just need to fill in all the details. 


There are a ton of books that can be used in this manner.  All of the No, David books are possibilities and a lot of Mercer Meyer's Little Critter books would work too.