The third and final part of our unit will concentrate on our students and
their
families. We would like to guide our students through the process of creative writing (short stories, simple autobiographies and poems). This will serve to increase our students’ understanding of the theme of family while at the same time develop their writing skills.
Students will be using words, phrases, and paragraphs to express their own original thought. In order to obtain this goal, we will show them the job of sorting, deciding and choosing the right word for the right spot. In order to reduce frustration, the teacher will not be concerned at this time with spelling or grammatical errors. In this area, we will not attempt to teach spelling or grammar, but approach it in the editing.
As teachers, we can provide conditions for creative writing by helping the children put their experiences into spoken words in a descriptive way.
Since the topic is their own family, the children will be motivated because the writing will grow out of their own experiences. The teacher will play the role as a guide, helper, encourager and supporter rather than a leader.
If students experience difficulty beginning the assignment, the teacher may listen to their reasons for not writing and then discover if they can’t find the right words, if they need help with a topic sentence, or an outline to follow. The teacher may provide a short autobiography of her/his own family thus providing the students with an example of how an autobiography is written. The teacher may keep a poetry file on families in general to help the Students who are having difficulty in this area. For the short story, the teacher can provide a main-idea sentence on the blackboard, encouraging students to expand from it. The children will gain a better sense of how to write a short story.
