Writing child study - Employment

trouble coming up with a topic. I told him he could do
anything he wanted, he could make a comic book,
write a story, a poem…just anything he can come up
with. He wanted to write a story about his family
which wasn’t a surprise to me because from the writing
interview and from previous experience with
kidwatching, I knew this was probably coming. I also
observed even with having a topic, usually it was still
hard for him to come up with a story line, characters in
the story, or the setting. Normally he would have no
setting present in the stories he writes.
Recommendations
up with a story line for the story because usually all I can
get out of him is a couple sentences, I printed him off a
graphic organizer to help him organize and generate ideas
because Gretchen said in the beginning of the semester they
were a great teaching tool.
One was a web with the topic in the middle and anything
related to the topic went in the surrounding boxes. I did this
just to get him thinking about unique things about his
family. Buckner says, “people do not see themselves as
writers because they believe they have nothing valuable or
of interest to others to say” (2005, p.9). This is why the first
graphic organizer was so important. It got him thinking
about specific things that his family does so he could see
that if I was interested in these things then anyone else
reading his writing will be too. The next graphic organizer
had boxes for characters, setting, a problem, events, and a
solution. I knew this was an important prewriting strategy
because from previous stories he has written, he only
includes one character, fails to include much detail, and
doesn’t have a beginning middle and end. This tells me he
needs help with building elements in the story and further
exercises with helping him think about these elements in
greater detail. Once we got it all filled out I had him begin
to write his story. Basically when he was done writing the
story all I had was a duplicate of the last graphic organizer
in a different format. Buckner explains, “…students keep a
notebook like a journal—they write in it and that’s the end
of it—your students’ work will improve” (2005, p. 35). The
story Nadjib wrote about his family going to the park I
found out was something they actually do. This makes his
story like a journal of personal experiences. Since it was
pretty basic and only had a beginning, middle, and end with
no detail I knew it was a good start and in the revision
process we would have a good chance to add some details
and make it meatier.
The next step I am going to take is going to come from Buckner’s ideas for adding detail and expanding topics. It
works simply like this: write as many three-word phrases as you possibly can about the topic in three minutes
(Buckner, 2005). I think this will encourage him to think deeper about his story and see how he can fit more detail into
what he already has written. Another thing that would work great for Nadjib that I found out about after we were
already past the revising stage and working on typing the final draft would be to incorporate Hindly’s idea of using
slow motion from her video we watched in class. In this, I would tell him to think about a specific part of the story and
write about it as if it is happening in slow motion. This would help him really think about that one part of the story in
great detail and help him see that detail is important for the reader to be able to imagine what’s going on his story.