Writing child study - Employment

Use of writing process: during writing (consider drafting, revising and editing).
Observations/examples
Since I noticed from his other stories he has trouble
adding detail about different elements within a story it
came as no surprise to me that this story was no
different. His first draft of his story was this:
me my brother go down the slide at the same time
won of us will get hrut my mom and dad come help
us up We go home my dad das exercises we play out
side and play with the leves
As you can see his story had no punctuation, few
capital letters, and some misspelled words. I also
noticed Nadjib fails to include any dialogue into his
writings.
Recommendations
Interpretations
Since his story really only consisted of what he put down on
the graphic organizer I knew he needed to expand on his
ideas a great deal. Buckner expresses, “If a reader is to be
able to see the story in his or her head, then someone has to
create that image, and that someone is the writer” (2005, p.
46). I could clearly see that Nadjib wasn’t able to see the
story he was writing in his head so I knew he needed some
help getting there. We used Buckner’s idea for expanding
topics. I encouraged him to write as many three-word
phrases as he possibly could about the topic in three
minutes. It was hard for him to just use three words because
he was so worried about only using the three words that he
couldn’t focus on the point of the activity so I changed it a
little and just had him write phrases, not mattering how long
they were. The phrases kind of ended up as sentences but
that was ok, the point was to expand his ideas for his story
and add detail into his writing.
To address the punctuation and capitalization I first started
off by asking him how to correctly form a sentence. What
would it need? He knew a capital letter went in the front and
a period went at the end. Then we went through and fixed
those parts in his story. It seems to me like he knows all the
different parts in making a story like punctuation,
capitalization and spelling but he doesn’t think about it all at
the same time while he is writing. This is normal though for
beginning writers. It’s kind of like learning to drive, you
have so much to think about all at once and you aren’t used
to delegating out your attention. Students this age are used
to focusing on one thing at a time, like the things we teach
in mini lessons.
The last thing that I did with him was work on taking out
unnecessary work and agreement of tenses. I had him read
me his story out loud and listen for parts that didn’t really
go with what his story was about or that didn’t make sense.
This worked really well because when he got to the end he
said, “Oh, the last two parts shouldn’t be there.” By reading
it out loud to me he could hear the story and it really helped
him understand what was in it that needed to be changed
and what parts didn’t read the way they would be spoken.