Writing Program without Retellings

[Lisa in the UP of MI]

Third grade dd started CW-Aesop A halfway through the year. She is doing fine, but upon talking to her today she says its the one course that she would like to change. I'm still not certain that we will change, but I'd like to get more ideas. When asked what she didn't like about it she finally told me that she would prefer to not re-tell another story but write her own stories/writings. Any ideas? Even just something we could use with CW to mix things up?

[LivingHope]

The first thing that came to my mind was Story Starters by Karen Andreola. http://www.christianbook.com/starters-helping-children-theyve-written-before/karen-andreola/9781889209043/pd/262001

This is a compilation of 65 stories without resolutions. So, the child is encouraged to finish the stories with their own creative ideas.

[Tress]

My dd also doesn't like to write retellings. She even thought that my insistence that she write retellings meant that I thought she wasn't creative enough to write original stories :D.

 

I decided to let her write her own stories while still doing the analysis of the model I had chosen. And now in CW Homer she sometimes writes a retelling, sometimes an original story. In Homer you need to analyse where the author places his emphasis, and I do require that she places the same emphasis within her own story.

 

I don't know if this is clear, I haven't had coffee yet :), feel free to ask more.

[SilverMoon]

Third grade dd started CW-Aesop A halfway through the year. She is doing fine, but upon talking to her today she says its the one course that she would like to change. I'm still not certain that we will change, but I'd like to get more ideas. When asked what she didn't like about it she finally told me that she would prefer to not re-tell another story but write her own stories/writings. Any ideas? Even just something we could use with CW to mix things up?

 

 

Does she know in CW she can change the characters, the setting and practically everything, as long as she stays true to the sequence of events and the moral? Shake it up! My oldest DS's Princess and the Pea became Catwoman and the Diamond. Catwoman was trying to join a particular team of villains, and to prove she really was a worthy villian she had to steal a special diamond from a museum.

 

My more black and white DD usually just changed the characters names and basically told the same story. Now my middle ds (finishing 4th grade) seems able to interject cars, race cars and tools into practically any story.