Nan in Mass et al

[Storm Bay]

Nan,

 

Our attempts with Keys to Literary Analysis have failed, and we're about to embard on your idea of WEM questions for reading. How much writing would you recommend? Could we start off discussing and having dd write out answers to the questions rather than with essays? I've been fighting 2 battles with one subject here; writing essays and literary analysis. She's finally liking the literature itself, which is a feat in and of itself since it's assigned reading and not what she'd choose herself. And it doesn't "ruin" the books she chooses on her own.

 

Anyone else with insight on this who also eschews literary analysis themselves, as I have always done, is welcome to chime in with what they've done, of course. This is for my aspiring science major who has to do this just because it's part of education, not because either of us wants it! I need to relearn Algebra and to learn Geometry, so learning to analyze novels is not on my current to do list. I realize that some of you are brilliant at it and have heard strong arguments in favour of it, but we have to pick and choose our battles, so essay writing is moving to English and history.

[Cedarmom]

This answer may be wimpier than what you want, but it is what I did with my math oreinted son. When we did book WEM style, I had him keep the journal. He was required to write a 2-3 sentence summary of each reading, write down a quote he liked from each reading, and write a question or something he found interesting from each reading. In the middle of the book I may have him do a writing assignement. Then at the end of the book we discussed the questions orally. Then do one essay at the end of the book. Basically we did a lot of discussion and not as much writing. On a side note, I usualy had him read the section that corresponded to what he was reading (poetry, autobiography) So he had read them several times. And always been kind of bored. This time however when he read on the Novel , he started spouted all the things he had learned, because he found them so interesting. SO, don't give up. It may take a while to sink in. But eventually, they will get at least a little.

[JennW in SoCal]

Cedarmom-- that isn't a wimpy answer at all! It shows how smart it is to tailor things to fit your unique situation.

 

I really like the WEM -- it helped the literary analysis light bulb to finally go on in my head! I've had my kids keep a reading journal, though not consistently. We use the questions as a springboard for discussion and the only writing I require from literature is a couple of essay assignments each month. I agree that little by little the terminology and skill of analysis starts sinking in.

 

This isn't directly related to Karin's question, but I thought I would throw it into the discussion. Writing is an important skill for scientists, too, and not just for lab reports. My dad was a physics professor, and he always included written components in his exams because he felt scientists need to be able to clearly and concisely explain things to each other and to the general public. So be sure to include some good science writing for non-fiction analysis. Keep up with narrations or other short writing assignments for history and science as itt is a good writing exercise -- like a musician practicing scales.

[Storm Bay]

This isn't directly related to Karin's question, but I thought I would throw it into the discussion. Writing is an important skill for scientists, too, and not just for lab reports. My dad was a physics professor, and he always included written components in his exams because he felt scientists need to be able to clearly and concisely explain things to each other and to the general public. So be sure to include some good science writing for non-fiction analysis. Keep up with narrations or other short writing assignments for history and science as itt is a good writing exercise -- like a musician practicing scales.

 

 

Yes, I've been telling dd this, but not with the musician illustration. My db has a Ph.D. in Physics, my uncle has a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and did tons of research followed by being a dean, etc. But trying to get this through my wonderful albeit stubborn 14 yo's lovely head is posing to be a great challenge. Logic has proved useless in this specific endeavour. I've also told her that next year she can expect to average at least one page of writing per school day based on a 5 day week, but not all essays. Lab reports, essays and other things. This has not stopped her resistance, and if it weren't for the fact that they do at least that much writing in the local ps, she might opt for that (plus she's heard stories about at least one less than stellar teacher there.)

 

She also knows that she won't graduate from high school or get into college/university unless she writes. She may be stubborn, but I've been called that before, too ;).

[Storm Bay]

This answer may be wimpier than what you want, but it is what I did with my math oreinted son..

 

 

Oh, no, this is less wimpy than I want ;). I'm trying to avoid the essays in literary analysis for at least a year or two until she begins to hit the age of reason. By reason I mean that she's more reasonable; I thought I ought to explain that given that this is a classical homeschooling forum :D.

[Cedarmom]

Oh, no, this is less wimpy than I want ;). I'm trying to avoid the essays in literary analysis for at least a year or two until she begins to hit the age of reason. By reason I mean that she's more reasonable; I thought I ought to explain that given that this is a classical homeschooling forum :D.

:lol::lol:

I agree on waiting until they are reasonable. We did many questions orally. This seemed easier and less intimidating for my son. The literary essays he did started out just being narratives, and then easier more literal literary analysis. I also use Omnibus so we answered one of their essay questions, or I had him find the theme and give examples from the books. He did more of his writing on factual things such as history or science.

[elizabeth]

 

http://staff2.esuhsd.org/danielle/APLit/Lit%20Crit/Lit%20Analysis.pdf Photocopy after printing , make several copies as this is the best thing ever for studying literature analytically. I took several courses in college and wish I had mastery of these principles prior to taking upper level literature courses..The woman that wrote this has taught AP English for 25 years. I think of her as our patron saint of literary analysis . This is all I needed to know about literary analysis . No more, no less. We use this for discussing each Great Book rather than the tedious, superficial ,hopelessly banal "study guide," approach. Hope this is what you seek.

[Nan in Mass]

My older one struggled with writing, but now writes ok. We did a lot of things to try to help. Some did, and some probably didn't. One of the biggest things was to separate his writing for literature from his learning to write. Yes, it would be more efficient to do them together, but it didn't work at first. He needed to practise writing with a very contrived assignment, and I didn't want to do contrived assignments with great books. It would have messed up the great books. So we worked on writing separately. We did some of Writing Strands, some of Format Writing, some Powerful Paragraphs, and some other things. I had to make sure he understood that he had to state the obvious and say things that he knew I already knew when we were doing the contrived stuff. He practised telling stories one year. It was a long process. I also had to give him a list of how to elaborate. I went something like give example, discuss implications, give background material, give related material, give uses, give details, ... Format Writing is horrible, but it was very useful as far as that sort of thing went. My husband worked on writing a 5 paragraph paper with him, since he has to do technical writing for work. We kept whittling away at it until he was writing better. Meanwhile, for great books, I tried to get him to write something of some sort. This was sometimes a short report on something he was curious about and didn't know anything about already. Often it was a reaction to something he had read. He would say, "But that isn't true because blank." And I would say, "Ok, write that down. First he'd make a little list of his points, then he'd write. It had to be something that he didn't already know if it was a report. That last bit is important. I had him make notes in the book, questions or reactions or occasionally, if the work was dense, a summary. These were minimal at first. What a stupid idea! That will never work. You just can't do that. Cool! Way to go! And so forth. The idea was to write your reactions as you went. We read aloud together and discussed tons. On harder or longer works, we wrote brief summaries as we went. Sometimes I told them what to write, if it was complicated or I was feeling impatient. Usually at some point during the book we had an idea for something short (a paragraph). For example, when we read The Iliad, we wrote short bits describing friends similar to the introduction to the characters at the beginning of the book. Or one of my sons would make a cool observation during a discussion and I would tell him to write it down. At the end of the book, we did TWEM questions orally. Then they would write something or they would do a project. The idea for these came either while we were reading the book or during the questions. It is easier to write if you have something to say. I listened until I heard them being fired up about something, and then suggested it as a paper to write at the end. They caught on quickly and began making suggestions themselves. Sometimes it would be more of a comparison. Someone would say, "That is just like when such and such happened in such and such." I would tell them to write it out. Sometimes they did a project instead. We started off slowly. For Gilgamesh, my son asked if he could make a model reed boat. He spent a happy few hours mucking about in the weeds cutting reeds and tieing them into a a boat. For the bits of Old Testament he read, he wrote half a page saying which translation he liked best, giving reasons. It wasn't as though he suddenly, the minute we began great books, could write a paper. Pinkmonkey has paper subjects which you can look at if you need ideas. Mine resorted to this for Dr. Faustus and wound up writing a paper about whether Dr. Faustus was a hero. I think it is important, though, that great books writing be about something about which the student has some thoughts. Sometimes mine investigated a historical aspect. When we read Common Sense, my oldest wrote a report on the history of the Quakers, something he got curious about. If no paper ideas showed up, mine did something else.

 

Ok - the computer just ate the second half of my post, so if this half doesn't match up with the first half, forgive me, ok?

 

I think it is important that a student not write something for great books unless it is something about which they have something to say. I vote you don't spoil it by asking for too much writing.

 

I am not brilliant at this. It was obvious by the questions I asked when I first began great books. It is obvious whenever I read one of the more learned literary discussions. But I feel that TWEM was written for people like me, people who don't know how to read great books. It shows you how to get lots out of the works even without the background, nice practical things that have meaning to you personally and will make your life richer. We've learned so much bumbling along.

 

If it is any help, on average per day my high schooler probably wrote about 2/3 page of Latin, 3 or 4 pages of math, and a page of something else - great books notes or a paper, or a page of nature journal, or science questions, or a personal realization or exploration of an idea for peace studies, or a writing assignment, or whatever. He didn't begin by writing that much. That may be rather light, but considering where he began, I think he did really well.

 

Enjoy!

[Storm Bay]

My older one struggled with writing, but now writes ok. We did a lot of things to try to help.Enjoy!

 

 

Thanks--I'm printing this. My dd told me today she thinks she might become a mathematician instead of a scientist so that she doesn't need 3 degrees to get a job and because she thinks that she can get away with writing less. I'm not sure that that's true, but she wasn't at her happiest time of the day, either. She just feels like more than one degrees would mean she'd be in school forever.

 

We have Format Writing, which is dry as dust, but we used for a while. We can pull that out of the box and try it again. We haven't used Writing Strands for a few years because she hated it (but then she hates any writing program after a while.) I like the idea of starting with short things such as reactions and paragraphs.

[Storm Bay]

http://staff2.esuhsd.org/danielle/APLit/Lit%20Crit/Lit%20Analysis.pdf Photocopy after printing , make several copies as this is the best thing ever for studying literature analytically. I took several courses in college and wish I had mastery of these principles prior to taking upper level literature courses..The woman that wrote this has taught AP English for 25 years. I think of her as our patron saint of literary analysis . This is all I needed to know about literary analysis . No more, no less. We use this for discussing each Great Book rather than the tedious, superficial ,hopelessly banal "study guide," approach. Hope this is what you seek.

 

 

Thanks! It's so nice and concise; I can add this to Nan's advice, plus other suggestions, and to WEM. Six pages--even I can handle that.

[asta]

Thanks--I'm printing this. My dd told me today she thinks she might become a mathematician instead of a scientist so that she doesn't need 3 degrees to get a job and because she thinks that she can get away with writing less. I'm not sure that that's true, but she wasn't at her happiest time of the day, either. She just feels like more than one degrees would mean she'd be in school forever.

 

This is where DS is: once he realized the sheer amount of work that went into writing up a biology lab, science in general suddenly didn't seem as attractive. I'm hoping that this will change somewhat once we start Chemistry (a more interesting subject for him).

 

 

a

[Nan in Mass]

If you use Writing Strands, look for the purpose of the assignment. It seems like isn't always the stated purpose. Both WS6 and WS7 have an assignment to teach the formula for a five paragraph paper. I like the one in WS7 better than the one in WS6. Some of WS is meant to teach about the choices writers make when they write their books, things like how the setting effects their book, how they make their characters seem alive, how to make their characters move around in the book, or decisions about how much information you are going to give your reader. The excersizes to practise this were pretty contrived. I tried to look at what was being taught and find examples in children's books. We used our box of Beatrix Potter books often for this because they are something my chidlren have almost memorized and they are quick. After we had found enough examples that everyone understood the point, we looked at the assignment and altered it enough that the children could bear doing it. I made sure they knew that they didn't have to be creative or make a good piece of writing out of the assignment; they just had to practise creating the point. The assignments aren't ones that lend themselves well to producing a wonderful creative work because in order to produce something good, you have to make those writer-decisions fit your particular work, at which point they no longer match the assignment. If you are supposed to be practising writing in the first person, you discover that in order to make your piece a good one and not ruin it, you really ought to write it in the third person. Maybe some students can manage to do good writing and still follow the directions, but mine couldn't. However, it didn't matter. As long as they got the point, it didn't matter if the writing wasn't great. If they are in the mood and the assignment is open enough, they can occasionally do something good. I know because for years now I've insisted on a Christmas story and they have all been wonderful. However, like most creative endevours, it takes tons of energy, and they prefer to put their energy into something else. They certainly aren't going to put it into "some stupid assignment". They can learn to write without doing that, and I object to forcing people to be creative. (Ok - I know that necessity is the mother of invention, but when a teenager is creative, they put their heart into their creation and I don't want to be stuck with having to be critical of that creation and hurting their heart. Inevitably, by the time the creation is finished, it no longer looks like the assignment. Anything my children write is fraught with spelling errors. They are young, still, and the wording or the structure usually isn't perfect. If they were adult and I weren't their mother and they weren't so high strung and sensitive, yes, they would probably benefit from being critisized and doing lots of rewriting, but I refuse to do it. If they wanted to become writers, they would be more willing to subject themselves to it, but they don't. Whenever they bring me a piece of writing that they are delighted with, I offer only praise. Sometimes I will ask if they want me to fix the spelling. Sometimes they say yes, and sometimes they want to be left with the happy feeling of having made something nice and don't want to look at it again and possibly find that it wasn't as nice as their idea of it.)

 

The other Writing Strand assignments deal with expository writing. They tend to give a formula for a particular type and then an assignment to practise the formula. We look at the formula and then I let my children come up with their own ideas for practising if they don't like the book's choice. I also found that they need to keep practising it a few weeks in a row, and then be reminded of it.

 

I have always had trouble getting my children to make the five paragraph formula paper interesting. There is this whole funnel idea that you are supposed to do, but I have had no end of trouble trying to do that. I found that it was easier to use the five paragraph paper formula for dry technical things, and depart from that if they needed to write something whose purpose was to entertain as well as to inform. Their reaction papers definately didn't fit the 5 paragraph model. I guess what I'm trying to say is that although the 5 para thing is useful, if you want interesting writing out of your daughter, you probably will find it easier to just have her write an essay that has an introduction and a conclusion, but just flows nicely from one thing to another in between. The thesis statement might not even be in the first paragraph. The first paragraph might be a bit to get you thinking about the subject or a bit to entertain you or the story of how you yourself got thinking about the subject. Certainly, short reaction papers won't come anywhere close to fitting that format. I concentrated on getting my children to explain something clearly, to make it so I knew what the paper was about and how it was organized, to make me know what each paragraph was about, to give an even level of detail or elaboration for each point, and to make the paper flow. Then we fixed the little things like wording, punctuation, and spelling. You probably already know all this. I'm just trying to explain that although we used WS and Format Writing, my children didn't use those formulas very often when they wrote for great books.

 

Writing all this out makes it sound like I altered WS so much that there was no point in using it, but I have looked at a number of other things, and we keep coming back to WS. It teaches what mine need to know and does it in a rather loose way. It doesn't make things more complicated than they need to be. It doesn't teach the things I don't want it to teach (like grammar - we get plenty of that doing Latin). At least it is alterable. Most writing programs are too hard for me to alter, and I always have to alter everything for my children LOL.

 

-Nan

[Storm Bay]

If you use Writing Strands, look for the purpose of the assignment.

-Nan

 

 

Thank you! My dd never writes 5 paragraph essays because right now I'm just trying to get her to learn to write a one page essay. If I said 5 paragraph, it was my carry over from our time with Format Writing (we didn't make it to the essay part.)

 

No matter what I use, my dd is resistant to writing. It's been a battle to have her learn to restate the question in the answer to a short answer question. I have been thinking about just letting her choose her own topics to write and have stopped trying to get her to edit her papers until they are up to my standards. I had a horrid time learning to write essays, and didn't really learn to write good ones until I was in university and went to my aunt for help. She went through them line by line and word by word--really got into the nuts and bolts. She did it with her dc, but not until they were ready.

 

So, I'll rethink about Writing Strands, Format Writing, etc. We're also working on having her finish all her school for the day on a consistent basis.