Crafting Writers k-6 Ch. 4 and 5

Chapters 4 and 5 of Crafting Writers had great insight about teaching kids how to make their writing more interesting. Elizabeth Hale takes student's writing and helps them look more into it through their "five senses." This part of chapter 4 is really inspiring as a teacher. Hale talks about ways students tend to write, such as them telling, and not showing what experiences they may have been writing about. Looking back into my elementary years, I think I might have done the exact thing. I told stories by explaining simply what I saw, because that was the easiest part to write about. Hale talks about looking into more things such as smell, taste, sound, and touch. These senses can do a lot for a writer and are more interesting to read as a reader. She talks about how in some cases if the writer is writing about a restaurant they went to it's easier to write about what it smelled or tasted like. In this case, the writer should concentrate more on things the reader might not think about such as the way the food looked, the colors in the restaurant, or what the service was like. This can give a better description to the readers that they may not visualize. I think it's important for a student/writer to think about what the reader might not already know in general. It's also important to reach for better descriptive words. Instead of good, use delicious. This does not always work for every method in writing though. Hale mentions that sometimes teachers will tell the students to look up synonyms to a word but explains that this is not a good way of going about things as a writer. A student may look up synonyms for the word good and come up with delicious, tasty, superior, fine, or excellent. All of these words are not going to work for every situation. Explaining that someone did an excellent job and replacing the word with tasty is not going to fit the subject by any means. I completely agree with Hale when she explains all of this.
In chapter 5 Hale talks more about Punctuations in writing. Again, she does an excellent job explaining this. Kids sometimes manage to miss period after period after period. It occurs everyday in the classroom. This is not to say they don't know that a period SHOULD go there, it's because they simply forget. Periods are meant to show that the thought/sentence has ended. Teachers must explain to students that if periods were not in writing the reader would not know when to stop and may get the thought completely mixed up. She talks about italicizing, exclamation points, and commas. She describes commas as something to add in a sentence to make it more descriptive. "When students know more ways to vary sentence structure, there is more of an opportunity for them to create rhythms that are already a natural part of their speech." Hale makes a great point in this statement. If students know more ways to create sentences, they are more likely going write better, descriptive writings.