Selecting and Revising

This post is a follow-up on my earlier "Personal Narratives" post.  In that first post, I explained how we got started introducing Personal Narratives through Mentor Texts and teacher modeling.  After about two weeks of exploring different types of personal narratives and drafting various stories, we were ready to select one story to prepare for publishing.  In order to do this, we asked ourselves a series of questions as we read through our drafts (I modeled this process with my own drafts as well).  Then we chose just one draft that we thought we could write a lot about and would be most interesting to our future readers.

Once everyone had a draft selected, we began revising.  In this unit, we focused on adding sensory details and vivid words to our writing.  The kiddos came up with some pretty interesting descriptors, like "it's smelled like garbage" and "opening presents was very enjoyable."  I encourage them to read and re-read their stories during the revising process to make sure their story still makes sense, but it's often not sufficient.  (I know the feeling after noticing many typos in these blogs posts long after publishing them!)  We discuss how it's hard to check and improve your own work because you know the story too well, which is why we rely on writing partners.  

I create my writing partnerships mostly by ability -- strong writers support other strong writers and weaker writers are paired together.  I know the weaker writers will need more guidance, so they often revise in small groups with myself or my assistant teacher.  The more skilled writers are typically able to read through each others' work and notice places that don't make sense or suggest improvements independently.  They work together to cross out, change, and add to their stories.  It's kind of amazing to watch!  

The next step in the process is editing and re-writing... but this post is getting long so I'll save that for next time.