Super Writing Skills

By this time in the school year, I've instilled a love of writing in my students.  They absolutely LOVE to write stories!  They write about being super heroes, how they love to play at the park, their family, and so much more!  I often times take their writing for a grade.  My school doesn't do A, B, C, and F grades for K-2 classes.  For Kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade, the students' work is graded as E, S, N , and U.
E - Exceptional
S - Satisfactory
N - Needs Improvement
U - Unsatisfactory
This can be quite confusing for the kids.  So I made this SUPER WRITING chart so that the students can compare their own writing to the Super Writing chart.

It is SO IMPORTANT TO MODEL GOOD WRITING SKILLS for the students.  In the picture above, the kids can clearly see the difference in their writing.  Believe me, the students refer to this chart ALL- THE- TIME!!!  It has helped my students improve their writing tremendously!

Speaking of writing, my students each also have this writing folder at their desk.  It has 45 pages of writing charts that help the students develop good writing skills.  I give this to the students at the beginning of the school year, but you can give it to kids anytime you want. Click on the picture for more info about the writing folder.

Do your kids ever say "I don't know what to write about."  My students say this all the time, so I ask them to refer to their writing folder.  Whenever they come to school and tell me about an awesome activity that they did over the weekend, I tell them to write it in their "ideas to write about" page in their writing folder. Whenever they say they have nothing to write about, they can refer to this "ideas to write about" page and write about them.  See the pages below that are included in the writing folder packet listed above.  Click on the picture for more info about the writing folder.

Do your kids ever ask "How do you spell -------?" My students ask me that question at least 100 times every day.  Seriously.  OMG!  My answer is always to "look in your writing folder."  There are TONS of pages of common words that students need to spell in their writing.  It has TONS of sight words, blends, digraphs, word banks for animal words, numbers, days of the week, people words (mom, dad, brother, sister, cousin etc.), color words, food words, and much more.  Click on the picture for more info about the writing folder.

Do your students ever say "I'm done.  Now what should I do?"  My answer again is to refer to their writing folder.  Before they can start a new story, they need to refer to the "Revise vs Edit" page in their writing folder.  

When you revise your story, think...ARMS:

• A - Add sentences and details to your story
• R - Remove unneeded words and sentences ----make sure that you are sticking to your topic and not writing about something that's unrelated to the story
• M - Move or change a sentence or word placement...maybe something you wrote on the 3rd page actually would make better sense in a different part of your story
• S - Substitute or trade words or sentences for more exciting ones

When you are editing your story, think...CUPS:

• C - Capitalization - Make sure that you have correct capitalization in your story.  Names of places and people, months of the year, days of the week, titles, the pronoun I, etc....should all start with a capital letter.
• U -Understanding - Make sure that a reader can understand what you wrote.  Did you add finger spaces between words?  Did you use your best handwriting?  Did you make sure that your nouns and verbs match correctly?  
• Ex: My dogs runs fast. - "Dogs" is plural so the verb should be "run" and not "runs."
• P - Punctuation - Does your story have correct punctuation? If it's a telling sentence, it needs a period.  If it's an asking sentence, it needs a question mark.  If it's a yelling or exciting sentence, it needs an exclamation mark.
• S - Spelling - Did you check your spelling?  Refer to the writing folder to look for the spelling of how to write sight words and other common words like in the pages shown above.  Word wall words should also be spelled correctly. 

Click on the picture for more info about the writing folder.

Okay, so the students have revised and edited their stories.  This time, "I'm Done. Now What?" actually holds true.  The students are done writing.  Now what?  Oh, no!  Your writing block still has time left over!  Don't stress...the kids can again refer to their writing folder (shown above) for ideas of what do do.  

• Read your story again.
• Add details to your picture.  (Look at the picture below...the student added a cloud, a tree, and a ball bouncing to the dog.)
• Add details to your writing.  (Look at the picture below...the student added the detail "like to play with" dogs...instead of simply writing "I like dogs."
• Write a new story about a new topic.

That's all I have for today.  I hope I was able to help in some way!  Bye for now😃