We are authors!

I tell students that they’re authors the moment they first put pencil to paper, whether in preschool, kindergarten, or beyond.  But recently, we’ve been fine-tuning their skills, to say the least!  Over the past few weeks, students in Room 209 have been working to develop their narrative writing (story writing) skills.  This is a skill they’ve worked on repeatedly over the years, and in fourth grade, we focus on how to plan your story before writing in order to develop a well-crafted narrative.  To that end, we spent the first few weeks of the unit (in fact, the majority of the unit) working on planning a story.  Students developed a plot that included a problem that they were able to resolve, a solution that was connected to the events leading up to it (as opposed to being a coincidental resolution of the story line that “just suddenly happened”), characters that have distinct traits and characteristics, etc.  After conferencing with Miss O, Miss Stevens (our new Avon High School intern), or me, students began drafting their stories.  This week, we’re focusing on crafting an effective beginning for the story that hooks the reader.  Our upcoming focuses will be on endings, developing key moments, and the often overlooked process of revising and editing writing.

I encourage you to visit your child’s Google Classroom page with him/her to learn more about the work we’ve been doing.  As always, I ask you to remember that your fourth grader’s work is truly “work in progress” and that you can best support him or her by asking good questions and allowing him or her to share, not by making corrections or improvements to the work itself.  Please allow us to do this in class, instead.

Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss