The Happenings in My Classroom

After spending the weekend grading my student's writing, I was very surprised to see what they wrote about. Their assignment was to write a personal narrative (memory story) about one thing (a seed story) that has happened to them. It should have been several paragraphs full of details, leading with hook that made me want to keep reading it and ending with a conclusion not just stopping. They should have used punctuation, capitalization, and correct spelling.
Mind you it is the start of the year and many of my students don't really enjoy writing, so completing this writing for them was pretty tough, yet reading them was pretty hilarious.

• One student wrote about how his mom was very special to him and that his favorite thing to do with her is go shopping. They bought many things and when they came home, his dad got mad at them for spending all his money, but then was happy in the end because they had bought a lotto ticket and won $1,000.

• Another student wrote about his uncle and how they played tackle football. He got tackled 23 times by his uncle and now he owes his uncle $23 because he bet him he couldn't tackle him 23 times.

• One student wrote 2 1/2 pages about how jealous she was that her dad got a new cell phone and she had an old one.

There were many good ones too:

• One student wrote about her dog having to go the vet and how she held him in her lap on the way home and took care of him.

• Another student wrote about visiting his cousin and all the things they did together.

• Another student wrote about their visit to the zoo and all the animals they saw.