September 28, 2000 - events of Joseph

The events of the story of Joseph were NOT meant to be written by memory. It would be difficult to remember them all - and it is important for the children to learn to refer to the story and follow the correct sequence. The focus of this writing activity is to get your children to think
sequentially about the events in the story, to be able to prioritize and use discrimination in deciding whether an event is important enough to include in a summary, and then to list them in the correct order. All of these things are "pre-writing" skills that children have to learn and be
comfortable with before they begin actually writing a summary paragraph. The goal is to just GET THEM WRITING. Copying my paragraph and cutting apart the sentences and playing a sequence game with them is an excellent sequence activity, but in this case it's the WRITING part that we need to see them doing. We don't want to get off track, even if it is on another learning activity. IF your daughter has a VERY difficult time listing the events - try having her list them verbally and you write them down - work on this together and refer to the Bible as necessary. You may have her simply copy my paragraph if she is really struggling with writing on her own, but it would be better to have her at least try on her own first. Also - copying a passage from a book or from the Bible in another case might work very well, but in this particular instance, it is a SUMMARY that we are looking for and in writing the whole passage out - she will not have learned about summarizing her thoughts and writing them out as pertains to the story. Learning to make a distinction between what is important enough to include in a summary and what is not - is difficult for children to understand. They need to practice in doing it or they will not be good at it - and that is one of the goals of this exercise. The reason I really favor having the children write lists is that it not only helps them organize their thoughts and think about they want to say, but when it comes time to actually write it all out - no child will EVER have to say," I don't know what to write" because they will have a list of things to say RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM! (By the way, if I had a nickel for everytime I heard the phrase, "I don't know what to write!" from both children and adults - my own son being, at one time, the worst offender - I'd be a rich woman.) That's why I like lists!

Dorian