Since the beginning of term there has been a veritable explosion of narrative writing in the neighbourhood. All the students have worked on at least one story, many have written two or more, and some have written one story that is reaching EPIC proportions! In the past two Friday Feedback sessions, several students have read their drafts aloud to the neighbourhood, and received really useful tips and comments from their peers. Moving towards publication is a goal with many steps along the way...
The process of conferencing with each student regarding the content, sentence structure, spelling and overall shape of their narrative is on-going. The teachers watch for emerging trends and possibilities for teaching points both to the individual as we conference, and also to larger groups when we see common needs. These range from structural aspects, such as using paragraphs, to improving word-choices to engage the reader, to learning about punctuation of speech or more complex sentences.
Every student has taken part in a proofreading and goal-setting workshop which focussed them on aspects of their writing they know they can work on. For many students this also involves learning to correctly spell words they usually mis-spell. We are running workshops to develop the students' skills in this regard, as well as specific targets for those students in whom we see a definite need to learn particular patterns or grammatical structures, such as how to deal with plurals!
You can help at home by asking your child if they would like to let you read their story or read it aloud to you, and give them your perspective on their writing...
- did they capture your attention with an interesting beginning?
- do you have a picture in your mind of the setting or the main character?
- did you find anything confusing? (sometimes students don't realise they are switching from first to third to second person point of view, and it can take some time for them to understand what this means for the reader!)
- do they want your suggestions for how to introduce or overcome a tricky problem?
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