Creative writing analysis and marking

[workingmom]

Hi All,

I am new to this forum and would like to introduce myself. I am a fulltime working women and have a daughter who is in year 4 and very much interested in sitting for the 11plus exams for Tifffins. I am new to England and thus quite unsure about the education system and how to prepare a 10 year old for an exam at this level. Probably it is worth to mention, she is the youngest in her year as she is August born.

She enjoys English and happy to write for me on any topic suggested. However, I am unsure how should I be marking it. I always worry that I look at the piece of writing from a grown up point of view and not from a point of view of an 8 year old. I do not have anybody to compare her writing to. Are there any rules in creative writing where including paragraphs fetches you say 2 points and then not including ambitious ajectives cuts 3 marks off your total. Are there rule like so ? I could not find anything specific on the internet and so looking for help from you all.

Thanks in advance.

[fairyelephant]

Hi working mom, so sorry you haven't had a reply as yet! I am neither a tutor nor a teacher, but I used this strategy prompted by my sister who teaches at a prep school, to help my DS improve his story writing for eleven plus. It's quite prescriptive, but he needed structure in his writing, you might be able to be less rigid with your DD.
The story should have a beginning, middle and end. We used this to structure a plan - an interesting opening paragraph to introduce a setting and characters using some good description. One or two paragraphs in the middle where the main action/events take place. Finally a concluding paragraph.
DC should try to include plenty of level 5 punctuation. Obviously sentences should all start with a capital letter, end with a full stop and have a comma where required. Harder punctuation should also be used. We did this by trying to include speech or (even better) thoughts which might include a question such as "What am I doing here?" Ben wondered "I should be safely at home watching Match of the Day!" And also a sentence including a semi colon.
A simile or metaphor should be included.
There should be some good vocabulary, no use of the word "said" etc. a good prompt is to think about senses - what is your character seeing, feeling, hearing, touching etc - use of similes and metaphors can be introduced that way.
We used this list like a score sheet and to help in planning. Many on the forum think creative writing shouldn't be prescriptive but if you are struggling to get DC to write something that might get some marks, or just wondering what marks can be given for, like you workingmom, it's quite useful I think.
Good luck, let us know how it goes.

[Ladymuck]

Have a look here http://thegrid.org.uk/learning/english/ ... ndex.shtml for the student friendly app for writing. This is a grid which should help you to have a go at levelling your dd's work as well as being able to concentrate on where she needs to improve.

[workingmom]

Thank you for this. It is very useful.

[Mum.my]

We were struggling a lot with our son for creative writing and made him join a crash course too in August. It didn't help much, on the other had put a lot of pressure on him. Please check this book, we found it very useful. He started enjoying it more as he had some interesting openings/phrases etc to use.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Descriptosaurus ... iptosaurus" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I used to encourage him to write just few lines first, then we moved on to writing few paragraphs and after a year he can write a 2 page story with less resistance.