Chapter 5: Do More Shared Writing

I can remember a shared writing activity we did when I went to school. The teacher started a story with a sentence. Then she passed the paper to a student and they had to add another sentence that made sense with the first sentence. The paper got passed around till everyone had a chance to write a sentence. The teacher then read the whole story to the class. I loved hearing the story. It was always entertaining and neat to see how everyone interpreted each sentence. It is great to do writing activities like this because it makes writing fun and adds a different twist to the writing process. It also does not put so much pressure on each child to write a whole paper on their own. Obviously, they need to be able to do this, but it does take the pressure off once in awhile and makes writing fun. This is an activity for an older age group. However, as a first grade teacher you could have the students tell you the sentence they would like to add and either you could write it on the board or help them to write it themselves. Also in this chapter it said not to focus so much on editing, but more on content. I feel I do not do this as well. I find myself working on editing just as much as the content. I see where it is important to teach them to write meaningful sentences, but if they do not learn the editing part how is that helping them for the future? Cutting up and reassembling sentences is a neat activity and skill to have the students do. This is also an activity you can do at the first grade level. We have a program on the computer that has a scrambled sentence, and they are to drag the word to the correct spot. Once they have it, the program reads the whole sentence so they can hear how it is suppose to be.