Zachary's Whale Story

In this case study, Zachary , a first grader writes and illustrates a ‘’whale story’’ and afterwards he shares this with his classmates. A brief analysis of the four systems of written language (meanings, forms, meaning-form links, and functions) will help us to understand his development in spelling and story writing.
I agree with Amanda that Zachary is a conventional writer who seems to have acquired the elements that characterize early readers. Specifically, he correctly uses the high-frequency words (the, and, an, of) as well as being able to use decoding strategies such as phonemic awareness. From his writing and narration, we can conclude that he has started understanding more complex stories and, therefore, entering into the transitional readers’ and writers’ stage.
Beginning with the meaning, I completely agree with Amanda that the referential dimension is one of the characteristics of his story. Zachary uses his prior
As McGee and Richgels (2012) support, Zachary’s story writing seem to be simple goal directed as it is written in past tense and includes causal relations of events that lead to a resolution of the problem. Moreover, his writing contains compound sentences and a story grammar (setting, problem, main characters, and a solution) ( McGee & Richgels, 2012). From my practicum, I have seen that there are some children in kindergarten that follow these rules especially during the narration of a story that they create. Lastly, in Zachary’s story we can see that he routinely uses the appropriate word order, separates the sentences in order to create correspondence between the sentences and the pictures and he usually includes spaces between