Examples of Student Writing

(This comes from the winter session 2006.)

My son is in Rita’s Kidswrite Basic Empowered class (which we think is fantastic). I have been putting the freewrite ideas in a file to pull out at a later time. The other night my son had a friend over and they were playing. My son’s friend loves to draw and for fun they had been combining different parts of mythological creatures and drawing pictures. I told them I had this really neat writing idea if they wanted to try. My son, who has writing issues, immediately refused. However, his friend who loves that sort of stuff, thought it would be fun and was very excited. My son, playing the host, reluctantly agreed and they both had a blast. Since the other boy acted as Sam’s hands and did all the drawing and writing, Sam felt free to let his imagination go and I think they did great for two fourth grade boys. My son’s friend who is in public school remarked, “Man, we never get to do cool stuff like this at my school!” For me, a very wonderful added bonus of being able to say that my students actually did a “group project”. LOL

Thank you,

Lois

Their project is below. The dragon really did have a spear like tail but I had to sacrifice it for the copier.

Create an animal that uses features from two or three other animals.

Would it fly? Hop?

Does it have claws or talons?

Can it eat both berries and other small animals?

Does it live in both the desert and forest?

Let your imagination run wild!