Creative Writing and Spelling

Posted by Coral on June 8, 2009

I’m stepping back into my childhood. As a 2^nd grader, I went to a great little Lutheran school. We moved, so I only went there for one year. However, a great memory I have is the Creative Writing assignments that Mrs. Gutter gave us. As a child I had a very active imagination, and it was a perfect outlet for me. So I decided to do the same thing with P (she also has an active imagination).

I take a plain lined spiral notebook. On one page I draw a shape of some kind. Using this shape as a starting point, P draws a picture. Example: (The S is the shape I drew.)

On the following page she writes a story, to go with her picture. I don’t require her to have good spelling or grammar in these. I just want her to concentrate on her thoughts, and getting them down on paper. I also don’t assign her any other Language Arts stuff on story day. I want her to have all the time she needs, without thinking about other work that needs to be done. She only writes a Creative Writing story, every other week on Mondays (I don’t want to overwhelm her). 

Later on I do go through her story and see what words she misspelled. I use these, along with words she has missed in other school work, as her Spelling list for that week and the next. The first week she writes these  words 3 times each, and writes a sentence for each. The next week she looks them up in the Dictionary. This helps a lot with spelling; since she has to concentrate on every letter of the word. We have a great Children’s Dictionary that she uses.

Macmillan Dictionary for Children

I enjoy seeing the improved spelling and grammar, in her stories. Along with Rod & Staff English 2, and some Copy Work (Scriptures or poems); we have a very nice Language Arts program. I’m glad I remembered Mrs. Gutter’s wonderful idea.