Write Aid

Writing is an important life skill, and writing quality seems to be on the decline, so it's something worth the kids spending some extra time on during weekends. 

With Jada, the goal is to get her to organize her words into a cohesive structure - intro, body, body, body, conclusion - rather than just rambling on and on with no sense of road map or setup.  I'm also trying to get her to experiment with different writing styles for different types of writing.  Here are two recent entries on her blog, based on weekend writing assignments I doled out, one which was to write a fictional account about an animal that did something heroic and one which was to write a poem about a season: "A Zebra Hero" and "Snow."

With Aaron, he still has a ways to go because his reading is fairly primitive.  And his writing is even more basic, because he still spells things out phonetically, reverses a lot of his b's and d's, and doesn't quite know how to punctuate.  I've typed below what he wrote for the animal hero assignment - my corrections are in brackets:

Whuns [Once] a bog [dog] that was a chow chow sole [saw] a bear in his backyard in frunt [front] of his ouner [owner] his ouner [owner] tride [tried] to scar [scare] him away but onle [only] made the bear angreer [angrier] so the bog [dog] ran out of the saffty [safety] and skard [scared] the bear away.

As I mentioned last month, our parent-teacher conference for Aaron got snowed out, so we missed the chance to find out more about Aaron's writing work in class and how we can work with him at home.  If anyone has any tips for 1st graders, we welcome them!