I need some suggestions for teaching students to write stories. Here are some of my concerns:
the “and then” syndrome. How can I get my students to realize they need to stop at each complete thought, and put a period? They want to string everything together with “and then”.
Length of story - is it recommened that you tell students how long you want each composition to be? I used to stress “quality over quantity”, but I realized a lot of my students would want to keep writing forever! What is the suggested length for 4th/5th graders with LD?
Also, I just installed CoWriter on my computer. Does anyone have some good suggestions as to how best to utilize it into my writing program?
Perhaps you need to first work on adding ideas before really getting to a story. For example, you could start with a sentence and have them add another in several different ways: ie, “The dog got into the garbage”.
“There was garbage everywhere.” (You didn’t even need a connector.)
Or “Afterwards, there was garbage everywhere.” etc.
Or you could give them two sentences and have them relate them.
It seems to me they need work with and, so, then, afterwards, and then, but, etc.
After this (and then?) you could work on some VERY short stories (ie 3-4 sentences, with particular attention to connection between sentences.
As for CoWriter, a couple things:
1. The newer versions allow you to give them a special dictionary for each type of story. For example you can add words about dinosaurs, space, etc. Even the older versions allow you to add words, but they won’t be together as per topic.
2. Look at the length of the dictionary. In some cases, you will want to use the 40,000 word one, but in some cases that will be overkill for a particular student. For a lower functioning student a lower no. of words actually might be more useful. (This is esp. true if they have a low reading level— really I think CoWriter is best for a reading level of at least 4th grade.)
3. Read the manual. There may be many hints. This is a fairly easy program to understand but it does have many features, so you should get to know all of them.
Anything more specific on CoWriter?
—des