Writing

== Students are learning to write from their own experiences. They will be decorating their own Writer's Notebooks with clippings, words, and pictures that remind them of things that have happened in their lives that they might be able to turn into a story throughout the year. ==

== When we’re writing we are making sure to elaborate our characters, settings, and events or objects so that the reader is interested in our story and can picture what is happening. We’re trying to use interesting words including adjectives and vivid verbs that really grab the readers' attention. We are also using the thesaurus to get rid of Worn-Out and Tired Words. We use the motto of "Show, Don't Tell". We use exemplar texts within the classroom as examples. We learn from each others' writing styles as well as published authors and play with different writing techniques and strategies within our notebooks. It is important to get our ideas across in a way that is not list-like or redundant. Our writing should be fluent and specific. ==

== We are working on creating attention grabbing beginnings or leads to hook our readers and make them want to read on for more information. We are also ending our writing pieces in a way that is satisfying to the reader and not leaving them hanging with many questions that were not answered within the piece. ==

Writing Ideas:
Fun with Words: Your child has a page in his/her Writer's Notebook for interesting words. Encourage your child to write a sentence containing one of these words, highlight the word, and look for these words as he/she is reading. Words can be added to this page at any time. Suggest that your child use her Notebook to inspire word choices while writing. After writing a story, go back and replace worn-out words with ones that he/she has gathered. For example, instead of, "The big waves rocked the boat." he/she could write, "The frigid, stormy waves slammed the boat. This type of writing allows the reader to get a better picture in their mind.

Encourage your child to use a thesaurus to replace worn-out words with more vivid words.

Help your child learn and understand the differences between homonyms. Homonyms are the cause of many spelling errors in third grade. Ask your child what our classroom homonym riddle is and help them to understand it and solve it. It changes often, so ask often. For example: What would you say to a man in shining armor in the evening? Night, Knight!