One of the picture books I use for story writing in my on-line subscription resource (Building Excitement, Engagement and Achievement in Writing with Dr Murray Gadd is Handa’s Hen by Eileen Browne
Set in a village in Kenya, it is the story of Handa and her friend Akeyo searching for Handa’s grandmother’s lost hen and it outlines what they discover as they search.
Jeanne Anderson introduced the story to her Year 1 class at Merrin School (Christchurch) and they decided to write about a real or imaginary pet of theirs that is lost and what they find as they search for the animal.
Just as Eileen Browne had done in the book, they also decided to enumerate the found items, add a descriptive word to each item and use alliteration in their descriptions, however bizarre this made the descriptions.
For example, one wrote of ‘five mooing mice’ and ‘six pooing pukekos’.
Jeanne describes it this way:
“The children loved the story and really embraced the idea of alliteration in their own versions. For their planning, they had to plan what they had lost, where they had lost it and what animals they were going to meet as they searched for what they had lost. The engagement levels were high!”
One of her students (James, aged 5 years 10 months) threw himself into the task and produced an outstanding text about losing his ‘cuddly cat’.
Here is his first draft.
James’ personal learning goals were to ‘use finger spaces’ and ‘be kind to the reader by being neat’, but he has gone well beyond this with his great narrative flow, his wonderful control over quite long sentences and his excellent attempts at spelling.
Here is his text as published by Jeanne and illustrated by James;
As you can guess, James is very proud of his illustrated text. As Jeanne says about James and his writing,
“I thought he did a fabulous job. At the beginning of the year James could only write one sentence that was hardly legible, so he has come a long way”.
Well done to James, Jeanne and all at Year 1 class at Merrin School (Christchurch).
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