Free Write #1 Sample Student Work

[This is a sample of one of 6th grader's first freewrites evah! Mistakes, cuteness and all :) Follow along as a first year teacher analyzes this shizz and comes up with some sort of plan to address his problems, and help make him a better writer in the last 2 months left of escuela!]

Prompt: My perfect spring break would...

My perfect spring bring would...Be in Hawaii. I would invite a bunch of friends like Carla, Iirwin, Ismeal, Gladyss etc. the weather would be nice every day no rain. I would have beach party every nite. It would be all expense paid. Oh did I mention that I would rent hawaii for a week you can stay in any hotel you want there will be skateboading surf boading. I will have free food there will scuba diving sky diving and more. I am telling you. it will be fun. There would drag racing exotic cars.

Ms. S' thoughts

the +

He's creative. He has a decent sense of capitalization, sentence structure, and punctuation. There is voice in his writing (e.g. "I am telling you. it will be fun."). He is successful in his attempts to use more complex vocabulary such as "expense" and "exotic."

the -

His sentence structure is inconsistent. Some verbs and prepositions are missing (e.g. "There would drag racing exotic cars," and, "I would have beach party every night.") Some thoughts are incomplete. Problems with misspelling some simple words (nite and skateboading - though I think "nite" is just a slang issue) and capitalizing proper nouns (hawaii).

Things I will try to address these issues:

-do mini-lesson on prepositions! show the whole class School House Rock clips online!

-do mini-lessons on spelling patterns (like -igh, their/there/they're, etc.).

Time for Goal Completion: I'm going to implement these tactics by the week of April 20-25, 2009 when we return from Spring Break (which starts on Wed. for us :).

Any one have some more tips or notice anything else that I should address in his writing?