Faith's First Story!

Faith made this book today and sat down and asked me "Mummy how do you spell Once upon a time?". I helped her to spell it and she sat for ages writing a wonderfully exciting story..... not a punctuation mark in sight but it doesn't matter. It's so exciting when this happens! I love it!! I especially love it as it was all her own idea! It was interesting to see her looking back for words she had already written to see how to spell them again when she wanted them, instead of asking me again. I was able to scaffold some 'spelling thinking' for her which was great and she responded to that and used knowledge from the reading reflex system that we use. The story so far goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a litul girl that went to her Grannys huos and on the way she saw a monst she scream the monst looked rouan at her
her Granny luct out the window and saw the monster chasing the litul gul a way
a wood chopper was chopping wood the monster looked round and started to chasing the wood chopper
 

I am looking forwards to the next chapter which she is going to write tomorrow apparently!

Monster Writing!

Whilst learning about Chinese New Year the girls drew a dragon and wrote a little about what they knew of Chinese dragons. They so enjoyed doing it that I followed it up with reading 'The Gruffalo' by Julia Donaldson this week. It has some fabulous descriptions of the gruffalo! I printed out these cards from Primary Treasure Chest which use the original artwork from the Gruffalo. They served to focus the girl's attention on the descriptive words used. We made a collection of our own descriptive words and grouped them together so that the girls could use them to help them write about their monsters! I used the printable page borders from twinkl as a writing frame for the girls to draw their monster and then describe it. I can't make the picture sit up the right way for some reason!

I'm glad that Eve is getting into creative writing a bit more - she gets excited about doing it and won't let me see until she is finished! She occasionally checks a spelling with me and I am finding her spelling fascinating - she can't 'hear' contractions so well, for example she has written 'is' for 'it's'. So far I'm not jumping on all those things, just storing them up for the future and being very encouraging and excited about her writing!

Writing in Riddles!

This week's creative writing project came up after Eve read a non-fiction book entitled 'What am I?'...... it gave descriptive clues and then you saw that it was a black cat. Building on another of the ideas that my mum had given me, I planned out this activity. I was more careful this time not to pile too much pressure on as I had with the pumpkin writing two weeks ago.

I made four simple strip books by cutting an A4 piece of paper into six strips and stapling one end, then writing the riddle a page at a time. I made two examples that followed the same format and that used some of the sight words we have been focusing on! They went like this:

What am I? How can you tell?
I am....... as tall as the trees!
I have...... a very long neck!
I can....... see a very long way!
I like to eat...... leaves.
I am a......... (Giraffe)

What am I? How can you tell?
I am...... pink and elegant.
I have........ wings with black tips!
I can...... snooze on 1 leg!
I like to eat....... yummy shrimps!
I am a ........... (Flamingo)

Eve read one and I read the other and she loved them, guessing straight away of course. I deliberately included words that she can't yet decode, such as 'like' and 'snooze' and 'eat' as preparation for next week's planned assault on vowel digraphs!!!

I had prepped two strip books for Eve, by writing out the format and the dots then adding lines for her to add her descriptions. She jumped straight in, these are her riddles:

What am I? How can you tell?
I am....... black.
I have........ wings.
I can..... sleep upside down!
I like to eat........ bananas.
I am a....... (Bat)

What am I? How can you tell?
I am....... gray.
I have........ big ears.
I can....... stomp.
I like to eat...... nuts.
What am I?

I had decided before hand that after the pumpkin writing, I was not going to correct Eve's spelling. As it happened however, she chose some words that required support such as 'upside' and 'down' and 'bananas'. She was so much more relaxed this time though that she welcomed talking through the process of how to spell them, and quickly identified how many syllables each word had and seemed to know 'segment' them into 'spellable' components. When she made an error in which letter came next I reflected back her choice as part of the whole word and she was giggling and trying again..... such a pleasure to see her having fun doing it. She is usually sooooo hard on herself and gets really frustrated by mistakes.

I was also able to prompt her regularly to use a tripod grip and I was thrilled with how beautifully formed some of her words were. I had not even considered that Eve would have leaped forwards so much without having been asked to do any creative writing since our first attempt. It is really exciting and has motivated me to plan more fun ways to get Eve writing!

Pumpkin Planting Creative Writing

I have been wanting to encourage Eve to do some creative writing for a while now but wasn't sure where to start so....... I picked my lovely Mum's brains (retired infant school teacher and educator extraordinaire........ if I could have been assured that someone like my mum would have taught my girls they may very well have gone to school but I couldn't so they didn't!!!).

Anyway.... Mum suggested trying writing instructions as a project and I thought that planting pumpkin seeds might be a good place to start as most of the words were within her spelling capability. Let's just say that it was a learning curve for both of us!

I had not appreciated how difficult the task would be for her! For starters she had to remember to punctuate with capital letters and full stops, to keep her letters sitting on the line and to leave a gap between words. Then she had to remember all the letter formations and create them whilst keeping in her head the next letter she wanted to write. She spelled the words out fine, but then lost them again when she put pencil to paper which she found really frustrating. She also struggled to remember the sentence that she wanted to say and so after writing two words was floundering at what to put next.

Eve has wonderfully creative language and expression verbally and wanted to write huge long sentences that sounded beautiful but weren't practical for a first try. I therefore helped her to simplify them but then felt that perhaps it wasn't creative writing as such as I had modified her words! perhaps it was more 'writing for a purpose'. On the bright side it helped her to think about the task in hand, which was to write five simple instructions to help someone who had never planted a pumpkin seed before to do it. Talking through the sentences together helped her to see how explicit she might need to be, for example instead of 'water it', she needed to say 'water the seed'.

I was also greatly impressed with her natural spelling. I thought she would struggle with 'water' but she pulled all of the sounds out correctly and I was really pleased for her as we haven't done a lot of 'spelling' as such, so she isn't well practised with techniques. One thing that I think I fell short on was in 'not correcting her' as I did correct her. for example, she knew how to spell 'the' but wrote it down as 'e-h-t'. When I pointed it out she got really upset and I think that I shouldn't have mentioned it as it will come as she writes more and more.

So over all..... It was a slightly fraught process for us, but I learned a lot to put into practice next time, and Eve was proud of the finished results! I think for next time I will model more and correct less. I'm also going to start a dictionary system for her so she can keep a record of words she uses regularly, as well as sight words she knows and a letter formation prompt sheet to provide a bit of security around her that she doesn't have to remember everything all at once!