Literacy Milestone: Revising A Personal Narrative
May 23, 2019
My daughter disappeared into her room after dinner the other night with her door closed. I eventually (after getting some things done during the unexpected quiet) went to see what she was up to. I found her transcribing rough diary notes that she had made during her first trip to Lake Tahoe two years earlier, turning them into a much neater and more coherent narrative. She wanted to finish it all in one sitting and wasn't quite done, so I left her to it.
She later brought the several page long writeup to me and we read it together. She had clearly added some commentary that was absent from the original notes (including what I recognized as a reference to something we had read in a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book). But the details of the original experience certainly came through, from my husband's and my stress at getting the car packed up to her joy at the snowball fight that she and my husband had the very minute we arrived.
In explaining the need for the rewrite she said something to me like: "These are my really important memories And they were all messy and full of spelling errors. I wanted to write them over neatly so they’ll last." Can't argue with that!
I did keep a journal when I was a bit older than she is now, though I don't recall ever re-writing entries. But I know that revising is something that writers do. Incidents like this give me hope that this reader/writer thing is going to stick for her. I can only hope, anyway!
Thanks for reading, and for growing bookworms.
© 2019 by Jennifer Robinson of Jen Robinson's Book Page. All rights reserved. You can also follow me @JensBookPage.