Cramer, Ron(1978). Writing, Reading, and Language Growth. Merrill.
When children imitate writing, they get a better understanding of the type of text they are reading and understand better what makes good writing. Teachers should often read to the students to give them ideas of what to write about. There are three stages of imitation. Close imitation is a summary of what the student has read. Loose imitation is when the child writes with the same structure as another story but they add or change things that were not in the original. Creative modeling is using the same “basic theme, plot, structure, of model common in literary works” (Cramer 1978) but the resulting composition is completely unique. The steps described in the text were to (a) pick a story or poem that has patterns, (b) read the story or poem to the children, (c) invite the students to join in the chorus with you, (d) discuss with the children briefly what they just read, (e) invite the students to write something patterned after the story that you just read, (f) look at the first draft to be sure that the pattern was being followed, (g) illustrate, and (h) make a book out of the imitation stories with the illustrations.
I can use this in my classroom to help my students become great writers. It is an activity that can be used with many different types of text and it will help my students learn important elements of writing. It doesn’t seem like it will be hard or take very long to do with a class. It looks like it will be really beneficial.