Revising Writing

I'm sure I'm not the only one who struggles with teaching writing! This year we're using Tapestry of Grace's Writing Aids. At first I was unsure about it -- it is in beta right now. All the assignements are complete and integrated into each week of TOG for Year 1, however the Teacher's Notes and Talking Points and Graphic Organizers must be printed off the computer and organized by me. But I decided I would use only Writing Aids for the first 18 weeks (2 units of TOG) and then decide if I needed to add more. We're in Week 6...and just got to polishing the first rough draft paragraphs.

So far it has actually gone well. At first it was putting information into Graphic Organizers, then writing sentences with the information, then writing a rough draft...all that was pretty good. But "polishing" a rough draft? I tried to work w/ Momo yesterday. She had 2 rough drafts, an expository paragraph on plant cells and a descriptive narrative on building the pyramids -- written in the first person.

Other than a few possessive apostrophes, her writing was grammatically correct. However, I would have worded things differently -- stronger, more expressively, etc, especially on the pyramid paper. But I just do not know how to express this without telling her what to change, specifically. And do not want to do that. I want it to be her writing!

Perhaps I'm just not good at revising myself. In fact, I know I'm not! I learned that from NaNoWriMo ...50,000 word novel written in 30 days -- don't edit (lock up your inner editor!) just write, write, write! And I did -- I'm a 2006 NaNoWriMo winner. Hey, I can put that on my sidebar! But have I revised it? NO. I can't. I know there are things that don't sound right, lots of things. But I just don't know how to change it. A huge part of the problem is the storyline changed so dramatically as I wrote -- the beginning doesn't fit. If I can just get the first chapter into a semblence of order, I'm going to send it to Jennifer at I Will Read 10 Pages. I still love my main characters of my story, Stone Scroll Saber, Robin and Meganna. These are their eLouai.com pictures.

Anyway...I haven't even worked with Ginger on her writing yet this week! Although, with hers we can focus on punctuation and capitolization and such! I obviously do better with the concrete.

I am looking forward to NaNoWriMo 2007 and so are the kids! And hopefully, we'll ALL be better writers by November 1st!

Edited to add -- you can be a NaNo winner too! You just have to write 50,000 words in November! And no, according to the official rules, it can't be the same word 50,000 times!