First Stories

One of the areas where I feel I didn't do as much as should have these past years is writing.  While the girls did handwriting worksheets every day and I had them write a sentence last year and draw a picture here and there, I didn't really put the focus on it like I should have.  I didn't focus at all on spelling, but the girls would still get really frustrated since they didn't have the reading foundation they needed to write out their stories or sentences.  Now that they are reading better I thought we should focus on our writing a few days a week.  We still do handwriting each day, but now we'll be doing writers workshop 2-3 days a week as well.  The first day will be a rough draft of their story and a simple picture to go along with it.  The second and third day will be for revising and then publishing their story.

I wanted to keep it simple and again, not worry about the correct spelling of things so I'm having them ask themselves 4 simple questions so they can edit their stories themselves.

1. Did you sound out all your words?
2. Did you start each sentence with a capital letter?
3. Did you end each sentence with punctuation?
4. Did you use a finger space between each word?

They were so excited to get their new composition books and had been asking me each day when they got to write in them, which I thought was a good start.  We talked a bit about stories having a beginning, middle, and end.  We also talked about how you can ask questions and then add details to your story to make it more involved and exciting.  After the way our writing went last year I was expecting them to balk and get upset, but they jumped in with excitement and 45 mins later they showed me this...

Brin decided her first line didn't follow the rules since she forgot a space, so she re-started it.  I don't want them to erase for their first draft so they can see and learn from anything they may need to work on.  Here's the interpretation of her story... "A dog bumped into a tree.  Because he was chasing a ball.  Who threw the ball?  It was the dog owner."  She obviously has work to do on her spelling, but she did pretty well sounding things out.  I was really happy with her story though and felt like she developed it pretty well for her first time. 

 Av is my "just get it done" girl so she has a bit more revising to do.  She too did okay with her sounding out,  though she kept inverting her "th"  She mostly needs to work on starting her sentences with capital letters and she also randomly capitalized letters that didn't need to be so that needs work.  Her story says, "The cat had a hat.   The dog had a hat.  The cat was striped.  The dog was spotted.  The End." 

I plan to setup a writing station that has all the rules posted as well as story and drawing ideas, but I haven't finished it yet.  I'm excited to keep them writing though and then see how far they come after they've been doing it for awhile.