Scott's mother writes, "I'm sending along an outline and a rewrite of "The Hare and the Tortoise" from my 10-year-old son, Scott.  We use the Institute for Excellence in Writing, and this outline and rewrite are based on those principles.  His outline is from the Aesop's fable; we sat down and brainstormed some good words for him to use in the rewrite, which are written on the right.  In the rewrite, he was required to use his vocabulary words (from Imitations in Writing)and to use as many of his dress-ups and sentence openers as possible.  It's been almost a month since we've written formally and I decided to go easy on him!  After he did a rough draft, I circled misspelled words and drew attention to grammatical corrections that should be made. You will notice that we need to work on getting him back up to including all his learned skills into each paragraph...But, I am quite pleased with his progress this year with IEW and Shurley.  At the beginning of the year I could hardly get one intelligent paragraph from him."

Scott's outline...

    
 
 
 

Scott's rewrite...

The Victorious Turtle

    Once upon a time there was a hare that constantly ridiculed the slow and sluggish turtle.  These two lived in an immense, lush forest.  The hare persistently bragged about his native ability of speed and gracefulness.
    The little turtle finally gathered up enough courage to go to the hare and purpose a race, which was just to shut the braggart up.  The hare assented.
    “Don’t go crying when you lose!”  he warned the turtle.  So the next morning animals gathered from miles around just to see the race.  The time had come!
    The words were shouted, “Ready, Set, Go!”  and off they went!  Although the hare sped off and the turtle was left way behind, the turtle still felt extremely confident.
    After 15 minutes of pouncing along, the hare stopped, leaned up against a tree, and slowly dozed off.  As he slept, the hare was about 100 yards from the finish line.  The slow turtle was 200 yards behind the hare.  Five minutes later the turtle was up to and passing the hare!  When the turtle was 20 yards from the finish line he stepped on a brittle twig.  This roused the hare.  He looked up and the turtle had won the race!  Because he was so astonished, he took on step backwards and fainted.
    About a half-an-hour later, the hare regained consciousness and sprinted to the finish line.  The bored fox was waiting there, timing him.  It had taken the hare 52 minutes to completely finish the race and the turtle only 20!  From that day on, the hare never bragged or made fun of any one at all.
    “Slow and steady wins the race!”
 
 

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