Thankfully, this was a planned email that I had Mr. Henderson send to help us in our writing today, but I didn't let the kids know that until well into the lesson. Some were anxious. Some were excited. Many were problem solvers.
I told the kids that this would make for a great realistic fiction story, so we first made a telling frame of all of our ideas. We thought of ways to solve the problem of being locked out. Then we all thought of a character and wrote down internal and external character traits for our character. We each chose what solution we were going to use in our story. Telling frames help us get all of our ideas down first, without worrying about sentences and sequence and punctuation.