Mar. 2, 2006

Writing Lessons...Descriptive Writing

For the last two weeks, we have talked a lot about descriptive writing and looked for examples in a variety of texts.  This week, we began practicing our own work.  Little Mouse is not really ready to write full compositions yet, but she loves writing.  Her exercises usually involve outlining and then verbally telling me the story.  Sometimes I copy it; sometimes I just listen and we talk about it.  We introduced this type of writing using, Alexander's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst.  I was not happy with the graphic organizer I linked to in that entry, so I made up my own.  A graphic organizer should visually represent the structure of the text you are reading (or writing), and this book certainly is not organized around what a day smells like, looks like, etc.  I asked my daughter several questions and she finally arrived at the conclusion that it is structured chronologically, starting in the bedroom getting ready for breakfast and ending there getting ready for bed.  Here are the notes she dictated to me: Other common structures for a descriptive text are:  top to bottom, bottom to top, left to right, right to left and from general to specific (especially in reviews).  To apply what we learned from studying Alexander, she outlined her own story, Little Mouse and the Great, Wonderful, Happy, Very Good Day.  This is basically the model I use to teach writing consistently.  I teach a concept, we define the terms, then we look at examples.  After looking at examples, we apply this to our own writing.  Usually, the first examples I use are from the bible, but in this case, it seemed to make more sense to study first, and then look at the examples of description in the bible later.  Today, we stepped back and practiced just describing.  This could very logically be done first, but I like to teach from an example.  I gave my daughter a graphic organizer and a tangelo, something she had never eaten before.  We talked about its various attributes and then she set off to fill out the little chart.  Not sure if you can decipher her interesting phonics, here, but you get the idea. Principles?  Leading Ideas?  I did not really organize these lessons in that way.  We are working forward from the foundation we laid back in the fall when I began formally teaching writing.  She identified the purpose of each text and we looked at the elements that gave us clues.  We looked at how the author fulfilled that purpose and compared it to God's purposes lined out in scripture.  None of these texts answer the highest calling for writing, but none of them go against God's teaching.  Teaching the elements of writing in this way, in my mind, is teaching the principles of the subject, although we did not even attempt to tie them to any of the seven principles. lesson plans, writing, homeschooling, home school, Writer's Workshop

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