Writing Stories

Yesterday morning after we dropped Pal of at the groomers, or broomers as Selena was calling it. We came home and I thought it would be fun to introduce Selena the art of story writing.

Supplies:

• A picture that will be interesting to your child
• Paper (we are using a notebook)
• Pencil or Pen

I glued the picture to the top part of the paper. We first looked at a book and talked about how a book or a story has a title. Selena pointed out the title on her book and found the title page. We also looked to see who the Author was, and I told her the Author is the person who wrote the book or story. I then told her she was going to be the Author. The first thing she had to do was look at the picture and decide what the title would be of her story. She very quickly came up with “Castles in the Sand.” I wrote that on the page, then told her we had to list her name as the Author. She wanted to try to write her own name by herself, but then decided to just let me do it.

With a few prompts or questions like:

• What do you see in the picture?
• How do you build a sand castle?

Selena’s story began to take shape. She managed 4 sentences to her story, and was very proud of herself when she was able to read it by herself.

Her Final Story:

Castles in the Sand

By Selena

The children build sand castles in the sand.

They dug a hole in the sand.

They put the sand in a bucket.

They turned the bucket upside down to make the castle.

The End

She had so much fun with this activity that I do believe we will make this a weekly event in our school. This promotes so much like writing, reading, language skills, critical thinking, analyzing, as well as retention of the written word and summarizing what the story is all about.

Later in the day I found this sitting on the table in the living room:

When I asked Selena about it, she informed me she was writing stories. This in itself tells me that Selena is turning the corner to have a great desire to learn to write. It may be scribbles now, but some day here these scribbles will be Selena’s words.

I am linking this to Giggles and Crayons.