Power Writing

This year, we added a writing curriculum into our schooling mix (apart from what is taught in our Language curriculum).  I waited on this so that I could take my three older kids through it together.  It seems to be working well, and cuts down on the number of times that I will be teaching the same thing over again.  Right now it is focusing more on creative writing rather than structured writing.


But, I was really wanting to add in a few lessons on structured writing.  As I was going through a tub of my old classroom supplies, I came across these posters that I used to have hanging in my classroom to help the kids with structured writing.  We called it Power Writing and I think I will hang them in my home for a while as we are learning about writing. 

Power 1 - Main Idea

Power 2 - Major Detail

Power 3 - Minor Detail

This is not something that I created myself and don't know whose original work this is but I did copy it onto posters...haha.

After teaching my older three kids about structured writing I had them write a report on the political rally that we went to a few weeks ago. They were to choose three things about the rally to write about.  They started with an intro sentence telling what they were going to say, list each of the three things and give a description of each, and then end with a conclusion sentence telling what they had just said.

Here is part of the report that Abby (6 years old and the one who would give permission to have her report posted) wrote about the Kirk Adams' congressional rally.

A few weeks later we were able to go to a presidential primary rally.  So, I had the kids write reports again.  This time I had them write a compare/contrast report on the similarities or differences between the two rallies.  We still used structure but just changed the tone a bit.  Here is Abby's report.