Editing and Re-Writing

Personal Narratives continued...

Yesterday I posted about the revising process that each kiddo went through to improve his/her personal narrative story.  After we had completed our revisions, the next step was editing.  I found a great teaching video that I used to model my introduction of editing.  We made the same "Features of Easy-to-Read Writing" Anchor Chart.

Again, the kiddos relied on their writing partners and red pens to check their work.  After the little writers felt confident about their stories, they had to get their stories checked out by a teacher.  Then they could begin to re-write.  

The re-writing process seems to drag on forever, but I feel strongly that re-writing is a valuable skill to learn.  Through re-writing, the kiddos incorporate the revising and editing changes that they made earlier, while ensuring that the message of their story still comes through.  Plus, they carefully check their handwriting, capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and spacing to ensure that their stories are "easy-to-read."

Today we finally added our cover pages and an "About the Author" page to complete our books. Most of the kiddos have now finished their stories (finally!) and they are ready to go for our school-wide Publishing Night next week.  Publishing Night at our school consists of inviting the school community to read our authors' books.  We pin each book on our bulletin board and put a little envelope (or library card pocket) next to each piece and leave index cards for visitor to write "Notes to the Author."  It's very exciting for the kiddos to get feedback from friends and family members.  Can't wait!

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.

Personal Narratives

This week we are going to be wrapping up our Personal Narratives Writing Unit.  This is the second year I've taught this unit, and I'm pleased to say that I'm feeling more comfortable with it this time around. The kiddos are really into it too!  

Our first grade team used Lucy Calkin's Personal Narratives Writing Unit to plan this unit, but also got a lot of ideas from Writing Fundamentals K-1 Personal Narrative Unit.  We started by introducing a few "Mentor Texts." These books guide our work throughout the unit.  Our favorites were The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco and The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant.  In both of these books, the authors tells compelling stories about family and tradition.  They describe special items and places with rich details and vivid language.  As we read our Mentor Texts, we developed an Anchor Chart to remind us of the important features of Personal Narratives.  At the beginning of each mini-lesson we review the Anchor Chart to remind the ourselves what type of story we are creating.

The kiddos started their pre-writing by thinking of special scenes and stories from their childhood (however short it's been).  I modeled thinking about teaching my younger brother how to ride his bike.  Then we moved on to thinking about traditions and rituals from our families.  I modeled writing about my family's tradition of going out to eat on the first day of school.  The kiddos really love to hear my personal stories and it's a great way to demonstrate the steps of the writing process that I want them to mimic.  One of my wonderful co-workers designed a graphic organizer to help the kiddos outline the beginning, middle, and end of their stories. Once they had their plan, they took off drafting their personal narratives.  It's so cute to see them get excited to share stories of losing their first teeth, going to movie theater for the first time, spending summer vacation with family, and visiting grandparents for the holidays.

We are now deep in the writing process and the kiddos are busy revising and editing. I'll post about how this goes soon!