Laurie4B, questions on REWARDS Plus and IEW

[Kathy in MD]

About how long does a lesson last in REWARDS Plus, science? I'm trying to schedule things.

 

Also I planning on starting IEW next year. You mentioned earlier that you wanted the structure but not all the dress-ups. Are you eliminating all the stylistic parts of the program or are you just reducing the demand for them? How is it working out?

 

I, too, am leary of some of the dress-ups, but I feel my ds could benefit from some of the demands - especially those for strong verbs and adjectives. I also want the check list for my ds and me. I'm thinking about just reducing the number of dress-ups required per assignment. I'm also trying to work in the skills he's learned naturally with Sentence Composing. However that should be easy as there is a lot of overlap. What's your opinion?

[Laurie4b]

I really, really like the REWARDS Plus Science. It does have some parts that we skip. For instance, we can skim quickly over the vocab typically, cuz that's a strength of ds's. They have some nice strutured writing, but he isn't ready for that yet. IEW is hitting the spot. If you were going to do all of it, I would say plan on 3-4 days per lesson.

 

The portions that we do do are the strategy practice, word families, spelling, and the reading comprehension parts, including the information web. We do that in one day. The next day, much lighter, we do the fluency readings and the mutiple choice. I"m guessing Day 1 is 45 min. Day 2 is 20-30. Something like that. I'm not a clock watcher type.

 

IEW. I still really like the structure part for my ds with the most issues. 3 word key outlines (and you get to choose the words YOU want...no wrong answers) feel do-able to even the most writing phobic! That eventually switches to three key words per topic (not sentence) for reports, which is what we are doing now. It is so very do-able. Success is so guaranteed. It's really lovely! The one problematic assignment was the fairy tale fable, mostly because ds is so creative. Of course, he chose a fairy tale with lots of gore (Bluebeard) and wrote about 6 pages of dialog. (The paper was good, but it was soOOO long. He got overwhelmed, but couldn't be convinced to cut anything. We may go back to that genre with me choosing a more boring story so we can get the concise three paragraph thing going!

 

Hey. It's hard to overdo the strong verbs and good adjectives. I've kept those parts. I would require an "ly opener" <shudder> about once every 6 months but that's me! My ds does not need help being over-elaborate in his wording, if you KWIM! All but one of my ds's (the exception is the dyslexic engineer type) have needed their stuff made more concise, not the opposite. They both naturally utilize plenty of style from their reading. OTOH would be ds dsylexic engineer type . He's in an outside writing class this year, or I would have had him do IEW with probably more of the stylistic elements, but not require one of each in every paragraph. I would rather shoot for the level of that kind of thing I actually want, than teach him to do too much of it. Again, it's a preference. I've just not needed them with my younger two. I don't use the checklist. I also teach when I'm editing (you're told not to do that) , but try to keep it to a minimum. (I agree with his basic premise on that.)

 

Also, my ds's have liked actually watching Andrew Pudewa themselves. They think he's funny. I'm thinking, "I have got a LIFE, you should see my to-do list, CAN YOU GET TO THE POINT?" (Remember that old anti drug commercial with the eggs and the frying pan: This is your brain on drugs? Well, this is my mood off estrogen) They , on the other hand, are laughing and taking in all the rabbit trails.

 

So all in all, IEW has been very successful for my most challenged ds, and great for his typically-learning younger brother, too.

[Kathy in MD]

Thanks for the information!

 

We'll be doing more of REWARDS plus. Ds needs the vocabulary. I'll rethink the writing portion since we'll be starting IEW next fall. However, since my ds believes one word is as good as 20, even though it doesn't answer the question, we may still do some of the writing.

 

I'm laughing about the difference in our boys. I'm anticipating that IEW will add words (aka description) as well as structure to my ds's writing. But I'm afraid that if I overstress certain style elements, ds will never move beyond them. I've been going through the check lists, trying to modify them. I've been thinking about changing the -ly requirement to an adverb requirement or just require one -ly only once in an assignment. There's a few other things that bug me if taken to extreme that may need changing.

 

I've decided to go with one of the prepackaged lessons for this year, so my ds won't get the jokes and rabbit trails. That's too bad, because he really enjoys and benefits from things like that. I anticipate using the videos next year.

 

Thanks again.

[Laurie4b]

The one thing I would say is to see if you can borrow the videos and watch them. The best part of IEW is in the videos; it's just that you have to watch too long imo to get the meat and the meat doesn't necessarily follow the outline in the notebook. The videos aren't actually for the kids, but for the teacher. That's where some really excellent teaching strategies for writing are taught.

[Kathy in MD]

The one thing I would say is to see if you can borrow the videos and watch them. The best part of IEW is in the videos; it's just that you have to watch too long imo to get the meat and the meat doesn't necessarily follow the outline in the notebook. The videos aren't actually for the kids, but for the teacher. That's where some really excellent teaching strategies for writing are taught.

 

I thought you were referring to your ds's watching the student tapes. I have the teacher's videos, though I hadn't planned on having my ds watch those except for the sample student lessons at the end. I'll go back and view the teacher videos and consider whether my ds would benefit from viewing them also.

[Laurie4b]

I hadn't planned on it either. But they walked in one night while I was watching it and loved it!