First draft written and moving on

On Monday we reviewed all the advice the students had put together to help the,selves to write the best first draft. The. They wrote, wrote, wrote. 

Yesterday I showed them their first drafts and pointed out what they had done well already. 

Some of them had a lot of writing, all of them had chosen a topic that mattered to them, some stories reminded me of other stories we had read ( this is a positive thing  for a young writer -  to write  like another author.)

The students already knew that writers write many drafts to revise their work to have the best possible choice of words, voice and structure.

On Monday we looked at different ways to include senses. Today we looked at different ways to include feelings and thoughts. One of the students mentioned that we should have had examples of including some older memories into our narratives. Such great writerly thinking.

After looking at the examples, the students experimented with different sentences that they could include in their personal narratives. We will explore and experiment with dialogue tomorrow.

This is just a beginning. More revision waits for us next week.

Examples from: Crafting Writers by Elizabeth Hale