The second journal entry

One of the hardest things to work with primary writers is conventions.  Conventions is the sixth of the 6 Traits.  As students work their way up through the elementary grades, conventions becomes a part of their everyday writing.  How to indent a paragraph; where to put commas and periods; spelling words correctly; all of these develop over time.  Becca is just beginning to spell words.  She has a weekly spelling test in her class, of which she does well, most of the time.

For her second entry (March 7), I asked Becca to write about her favorite book or books.  We talked about what it means to indent paragraphs, to add titles (not necessary in journals), and to write more than one paragraph.  We are also beginning to work on the spacing of our words and how they should fit between the lines.

As you can see, her writing is an average example of a primary writer.  From here, we will work on penmanship, and by fourth grade, she will be working on writing in cursive.  Again, spelling is a skill that develops over time, therefore, we should not be worried if our primary writers misspell words.  We want our writer to develop her thought process, thereby developing the other writing traits, which we will get to in future journal entries.

On a side note, Becca reported on a first grade field trip this year and has been excitedly participating in school newspaper.  She's been looking at newspaper stories and how they appear on the page.  If you notice in her entry, the beginning words of the two paragraphs have bolded letters.  This is because we use drop caps in our newspaper stories (which makes the first letter of a story three times larger than the rest) and she's trying to copy that.  Recognizing text features (writing titles larger, bolding letters, etc.) is a sign of the developing writer within a primary student.  If your primary writer does this, let her!  It's always good to promote the creative side of your writer!