Frog and Toad: Showing Vs. Telling

English teachers are famous for advising, "Show; don't tell!" But what does that mean?

I'll show you with examples from Harry Noden's Image Grammar (29).

Telling: Maxine is nervous.

Showing: Maxine glances at the midnight moon shadows from one side of the dark alleyway to the other, biting her nails as rivulets of perspiration soak her eyebrows.

Telling: She loved her daughter.

Showing: She kissed three-year-old Carrie softly on the cheek and tucked in the covers as Carrie slept.

Notice the word choices--glances, alleyway, biting, rivulets of perspiration, soak, kissed, tucked. Notice the pictures of nervousness and love painted without a single mention of either word.

Look at your students' writing. What do they tend to do--tell or show?  If they lean to the telling side, chances are their writing is general, bland, ho-hum. They're content to write, "It was ________!" (Fill in the blank with fun, cool, awesome, boring, or just about any other adjective.) Encourage them to include details and strong verbs, giving the reader a concrete picture. Done well, the reader will be able to infer whatever it is the writer is trying to show.

Recently, Frog and Toad helped us punctuate dialogue and experiment with synonyms. Now, for one last lesson, they're lending us some telling sentences to transform.

From Frog and Toad Are Friends:

One day in summer Frog was not feeling well.

Toad thought and thought.

Toad was getting colder and colder.

Frog and Toad sat out on the porch, feeling sad together.

They sat there, feeling happy together.

Ask students to write new sentences that do not directly mention the underlined words. For instance, how can they describe a day in summer without saying the word day or summer? How can they portray not feeling well without writing those words? To test their success, they can read their sentence(s) to someone. Can the person guess the gist of the original sentence(s)?

That accomplished, have students add pizzazz to an old writing piece with good old-fashioned showing.  It'll make English teachers around the world smile, leap, and dance. In other words, they'll be happy!

As always, share your students' best examples in the comments.

• For more practice, feel free to use the sheet here.
• For another showing vs. telling lesson, see this one based on Roald Dahl's Mr. Twit.

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A Friendly Reminder: Fix Your Grammar

Pausing for Parts of Speech

Verlyn Klinkenborg shared the following exercise in Several Short Sentences about Writing (60).

Copy or print out a couple of pages by an author whose work you like....
Gather some colored pens or pencils.
Choose one color and circle all the nouns.
Pause to consider them.
Then choose a different color and circle all the verbs.
Pause again.
Ditto the articles, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.
Anything left over?
There shouldn't be.
This will clarify the parts of speech, and it will help you see how the author uses them.

Please reread that last sentence--the purpose statement--especially after "and."

Make this exercise less about stubbornly trying to identify every last word and more about appreciating the choices the author makes with words. In fact, feel free to nix  parts of speech from the list if some of them are new or burdensome to your student. The goal is to pause, observe, enjoy...and eventually imitate.


I wanted to attempt this exercise myself, so I casually paged through several chapter books to find a paragraph. I soon realized it wouldn't be as easy as it sounds and decided to drop my post.

Then I came back to it. I opened Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, copied the first page I saw, and began circling, first the nouns, then the verbs, until I ended with the prepositions.

This is *not* easy. When I moved onto a new color and a new part of speech, I would find ones I missed from the last color. It forced me to consider and reconsider words. At first, I followed instructions and paused to study words. Then I got swept away by the pursuit and forgot to pause. When I was finished, uncircled words remained.

The take-away?  Do this yourself before requiring it of your children! Or at least do it alongside them. And don't forget to pause.

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Frog and Toad: Synonyms

Last week we used Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad Are Friends to take a closer look at punctuating dialogue. This week, let's use it to experiment with synonyms.

Frog ran up the path to Toad's house.

That's the first sentence of the first chapter.

Let's replace a few of the words and observe the shades of meaning.

• Frog dashed up the sidewalk to Toad's cottage.
• Frog scurried up the trail to Toad's cabin.
• Frog scampered up the walkway to Toad's abode.

How about another one?

He knocked on the front door.

• He banged on the front door.
• He tapped on the front door.
• He rapped on the front door.

With your students, start with Frog and Toad Are Friends or another easy reader. Find sentences to remodel several times, giving your kids the chance to pull from the deep well of vocabulary in their heads. If necessary, dip into a thesaurus. Compare the new sentences with the original one. What effect do the new words have on the sentence? Which sentence gives the clearest image?

For an added challenge, retell a chapter from the book, replacing as many words as possible.

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Ben Carson

Ben Carson, former pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has a great story. It's one to motivate an unmotivated student. It's one to encourage a discouraged homeschooling mama. I'll say no more but leave you to listen and enjoy.

Dr. Ben Carson Talks About His Mom (Mother's Day) from Faith Christian Center on Vimeo.

This is the same story in a different setting.

Adjectives out of Order

Typically, when we use adjectives, we place them before the noun. 

Like this:

"I respond, but really I'm thinking about Plutarch showing off his pretty, one-of-a-kind watch to me" (Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire, 83).

Is it possible to place them after the noun?

In Harry Noden's Image Grammar, he talks about five brushstrokes to add power to writing. One of them is Adjectives out of Order, a tool writers use to vary the rhythm of their sentences and to give emphasis to the adjectives.

When writers shift adjectives behind the noun, they make possible a third adjective. So, instead of writing, "The elderly, tired, unsure woman shuffled to the counter," they write, "The elderly woman, tired and unsure, shuffled to the counter."

Notice in the examples below that commas surround the adjectives, unless they are at the end of the sentence in which case they are preceded by a comma.

Khaled Hosseini uses Adjectives out of Order often.

"I sat in the back row, carsick and dizzy, sandwiched between the seven-year-old twins who kept reaching over my lap to slap at each other" (Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, 83).

"The wind, soft and cold, clicked through tree branches and stirred the bushes that sprinkled the slope" (Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, 112).

"Words were exchanged, brief and hushed" (Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, 114).

"He'd sit at the kitchen table with his flyswatter, watch the flies darting from wall to wall, buzzing here, buzzing there, harried and rushed" (Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, 366).

"His hair, short and brown, stood on his scalp like needles in a pincushion" (Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, 183). 

"Classy prose does not leap, complete and fully formed, from anyone's typewriter or computer or quill pen" (Patricia T. O'Conner, Words Fail Me, 38).

"She was very tall for a woman, slender and graceful, and moved slowly down the gangplank with the stately self-consciousness which happened to be the fashionable gait for a lady at the moment" (Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain, 54). 

"The April sun, weak but determined, shone through a castle window and from there squeezed itself through a small hole in the wall and placed one golden finger on the little mouse" (Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux, 13). 

If you'd like your students to focus on Adjectives out of Order, you'll find a thorough resource here.

For more mentor texts, go here.

Two Stories, One Pattern

Who: Writers in the elementary years

What: After analyzing the parts of a story in two similar picture books, students write their own story with the same pattern.

How: 

1. If necessary, review the parts of a story, specifically character, setting, problem (or conflict), and plot. (These are not complicated stories, so the discussion can be brief and basic.)

2. Give students a story map.

3. Read The Enormous Carrot by Vladimir Vagin and discuss with students each of the blocks in column 1. Students fill in the boxes as thoroughly as possible. (Think of this as a note-taking or prewriting exercise. Complete sentences are not necessary.) 

For the "Anything else?" block, take time to appreciate anything unique the authors did in telling their stories (e.g. alliteration, repetition, smallest to biggest or biggest to smallest, etc.).

4. Read Berlioz, the Bear by Jan Brett and fill in the second column. 

5. Notice with your students that, while these stories have differences, they are fundamentally the same. What are the differences? What are the similarities? Are your students aware of other authors who have used the same pattern to tell their stories?

6. Now it's time for students to brainstorm a story of their own. Invite them to begin mapping their story in the third column.

7. Write, revise, and edit the story, preparing it to share with others.

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Frog and Toad Teach Punctuation

How do you teach your students the rules associated with punctuating dialogue?

I mean, are they important to know? Can we ignore them?

I have The Jesus Storybook Bible within reach. Let's see how dialogue looks without punctuation. Hang on!

Saul! Saul! said the loud voice. Why are you fighting me? Lord? Saul answered who are you? I am Jesus said the voice. When you hurt my friends, you are hurting me, too. Saul's whole body trembled. Go to the city Jesus said I'll tell you what to do.

That obviously won't work. We need the rules for clarity.

But how do we teach them without crushing our students with tedium?

What about using Frog and Toad Are Friends, an easy reader by Arnold Lobel?

That sounds random, I know. The idea developed when I read that a professor teaches punctuation with Lobel's book. I don't know what his or her method is; I don't know the age group the professor teaches. An Internet search produced nothing. But the notion intrigued me. I borrowed a copy of the book from my library to see if I could get into the mind of that professor.

The first thing I noticed was the dialogue. I looked at Frog's and Toad's lines, trying to find a pattern in their structure.

I found six categories.

Category 1: Said first
Toad said, "Frog, you are looking quite green."

Category 2: Said last
"Today you look very green even for a frog," said Toad.

Category 3: Said in the Middle of a Sentence
"Then you get out of bed and let me get into it," said Toad, "because now I feel terrible."

Category 4: Said in the Middle of Two Sentences
"Don't worry," said Frog. "We will go back to all the places where we walked. We will soon find your button."

Category 5: An Exclamation
"Here is your button!" cried Frog.

Category 6: A Question
"Does Toad really look funny in his bathing suit?" they asked.

With those categories, I designed an assignment for students.

My objectives:

• Students will connect rules to real reading.
• Students will stretch their observation skills as they search for and evaluate the various categories of dialogue.
• Students will apply what they learn to their own sentences.
• As a bonus, students will write rules they observe.

You can treat the papers as a worksheet, or you can cut around the six rectangles and paste them in a Writer's Reference notebook.

You will find the sheets here. If you find them helpful, will you please let me know?

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