The Genius Ladder

I've always had a difficult time getting my class to write more than one sentence or even a few words.  Well not this year! I've been using the Genius Ladder for oral writing and writing notebook time. My smarties absolutely love this! The first couple of weeks we started out making the genius paragraph orally. I would first call on a student to give me a Blah sentence. For example, The dog. Then, I would have another student make the Blah sentence Spicy, The large white dog. The next student would make an Extender sentence which was, The large white dog was jumping on the trampoline. I know... it's funny. They are an imaginative class! We then talked about adding two more sentences to make a Genius Paragraph and summing it up with a Genius sentence. So here's what my class came up with the first time we tried the Genius Ladder. The large white dog was jumping on the trampoline. He stopped and saw a cat walking by. He started to chase the cat down the road. The cat ran to the park and the large white dog chased him all the way there. They played and decided to jump on the trampoline after the park. Ok, it's a silly story but I'm wanting my kids to know how to expand and wrap up a paragraph with a Genius sentence. We are still working on it but I can already tell we are on the right track to becoming Genius writers!