Authors' Access

A major Language Arts curriculum expectation for 3rd grade is that each student will create 6-10 pieces of written work throughout the year. After listening to different stories from selected genres, students come up with their own ideas for writing a story, a personal narrative, a poem, a piece of non-fiction, etc over the course of the school year. Students work with a writing partner and conference with the teacher to guide them in improving their mechanics, their voice, word choice and other elements of writing. Students take their idea from rough draft, to edited piece of writing to final publication. Their piece is typed, illustrated and then read aloud by the author who then responds to classmates questions about their reasons for writing the piece as well as their feelings during the process. This is repeated for each genre examined during the year.

Many students who either physically struggle to put pencil to paper (e.g. students receiving occupational and/or physical therapy) or struggle to maintain focus through all the stages of the writing process (due to autism, ADHD, etc) are not provided the equal opportunity to produce their best work. They must worry about holding their pencil correctly or keeping their minds on the task instead of being free to focus on the creativity they really have. Because of this, struggling students will use a digital voice recorder to tell the story they can't get out on paper. The student then will download their story to a computer using voice recognition software where they can begin the editing and revising portion of the writing process without much of the stress of physically writing their rough draft. (If voice recognition software is not available, an older "buddy" student could be used to help type out what has been recorded by the author).
Finally, students would print and illustrate their finaly copy of the story they were able to write.