Review: Daily 6-Trait Writing Grade 1

 Since I was not a marvelous writing when I was in school (mostly due to my dyslexia) I wanted to make sure that our daughter had a better understanding of how to write a proper sentence. I got just that with Daily 6-Trait Writing Grade 1. Before the lessons for each week there is a lesson plan for each day. At the end of every week there is a writing prompt to practice the skills from the lessons emailer in the week. There are 125 lessons in this little workbook. There is a rubric in the front so you can score your child’s work. If you have never scored an English paper there is a page before the rubric explaining how to use it properly. The back of the book has a proofreading paper. It tells you the symbols you should use when you are reading over your child’s work. These symbols will be the same that a school or college would use to proofread an essay. 

The workbook can be used doing 1 lesson per day during the week. However, since our school year is from January to December we only use Daily 6-Trait 3 times a week. During your school year using this workbook your child will learn 5 main ideas. These include ideas, organization, word choice, sentence fluency and voice. Every main idea is broken down into 5 weeks and every week is broken down into 5 days of work. Each page itself if not very long. I really like this because writing for a child that is 5 to 7 years old can be very overwhelming. The pages only have a few questions each. Some of them are fill in the blank, circling the answer, writing or drawing. At the end of the pages there is a convention activity. These consist of fixing sentences and properly pluralizing words, etc.

At the end of every week there is a writing prompt. The workbook will tell you exactly what the writing assignment should be and what it should consist of. Since I am using this for our homeschool we only have 1 student. So, we start off by making a sentence together and I have her come up with a sentence on her own. If her sentence is to simple for what has been asked of in the writing prompt then we make a sentence or two more together. I have her think of the sentences herself but make suggestions only the way to help enhance on what she has already thought of. I would highly recommend this writing curriculum and in fact we are keeping with it for 2nd grade. The pages are not terribly long, it is not overwhelming for a young child and each topic is explained in a way that a child can easily understand. Since we will be using Daily 6-Trait Writing Grade 2 for 2nd grade be on the look out for our review of that.