Story Starters

Throwing Up by Marley
April 6, 2006

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the second trimester Parent/Teacher Conference for Marley. She is progressing well in language development and doing very well in math. One minor issue is that the teacher wants her to do her personal best when she journals. Since the first day of school, the kinders have daily journaling. They draw a picture and then describe it. Even though they can't really read or write, it gets them started. They learn to listen for the sounds in a word and put that down on paper. Well, in the beginning, Marley couldn't do it at all -- the writing part. She loves to draw but didn't like trying to write out the sounds. Eventually, she started and we might see a sentence that looks like this: Me an Mommy lkn ad a ranbo. Translation, Me and Mommy looking at a rainbow. Mostly though, Marley draws a picture of her, her friend, Myah or me and there are some flowers usually. The sentence is quite short, some variation of: Me and Mommy or Me and Myah.

Mrs. Johnson (one of Marley's two teachers) and I discussed me doing some story dictation. Marley tells the story and I write it down as a means to get Marley used to "writing" more. So, yesterday I sit down with Marley and ask her to tell me a story. No response. So I decide I'll do a story starter. I write Colin's name down and ask her to tell me about Colin. She wanted to give one word answers so initially I had to ask her to say it in a sentence. The following is the first of our two efforts for the day:

Colin

My brother Coiln is so mean to me. When he is mean to me, I cry to mommy and tell her "Colin is being mean to me every day!" One day, he went to school and I stayed home for a couple of minutes and I throwed up. And when I was done throwing up in the trash can, I didn't throw up ever, ever, ever again.

The End

Afterwards, she drew the picture you see above. I think it captures the mood of the moment quite well!