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8 Year Old Writing Prompt Response-New Homeschooler


jdewitte
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I am new here on the forums and am starting my first year homeschooling.  I am using IEW for my reluctant 5th grade son, but I have been fairly unstructured with my 8 year old daughter because she is more creative.  I gave her a writing lesson this afternoon asking her to rewrite the following sentence to make it more descriptive using 5-6 sentences:  

 

It was a nice fall day in the forest.

 

When I came back to check on her 15 minutes later, this was her response with no editing on my part:

 

    It was a beautiful, quiet morning in the edge of the forest, and the trees were decorated in yellows, reds, oranges, and browns.  Leaves scattered across the forest floor and you could hear the bugs and creatures tip-toeing out of there (sic) burrows to find food.  It wasn't really warm, in about the 60s because it was fall, but the creatures weren't bothered at all.  The forest was just waking up, and the animals had a little light because if you looked just beyond the beautiful tops of the trees, you could see the bright, fall sun dawning.  If you traveled past this part of the woods, you could find the stream, flowing down the piled rocks that had been tossed around for billions and trillions of years.  I guess you could call it a waterfall.  It made an elegant noise that never stopped as long as there was water to travel.  No matter how loud you yelled, it would just keep doing its habit.   And past the creek there was a noisy section of the woods.  This particular part woke up right away and started hustling and bustling about.  All the creatures here were noisy and energetic and raced each other to get all the food for hibernation.  This section had more trees and was a little damper and smaller also.  But it had more things to discover, explore and do.  

 

This was the first assignment I have given her.  I knew she was a gifted writer, but I was surprised by how easily and quickly this came to her.  I am not an educator by training, and so I would love some feedback on the quality of this, but more importantly how do I guide her in her writing.  I have just started reading the Writer's Jungle, but I feel helpless about how to structure a program for her. 

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Why do you need to structure a program for her?  She's got good grammar, wonderfully varied sentence structure and great spelling (unless you fixed spelling as you typed it here).  She also has a good voice - which really is impossible to really teach.  Just give her opportunities to write about a variety of things in a variety of styles.  If you come across problems, then edit them and discuss them.  Or have her edit them but still discuss them.  

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Thanks for your advice.  My gut tells me to take a laid back approach at this point as well, I was just curious how others have handled a similar situation.  And, yes, it is her spelling.  I am almost ready to drop spelling at this point.  I'm such a left-brained linear thinker it is hard for me to take a relaxed approach, but I don't want to squelch her love of writing.

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  • 5 weeks later...

I'm a published novelist and I wouldn't have done that. LOL.

 

She has a gift. You don't need to add structure, but I do recommend she study the elements of fiction writing; character, plot, theme, setting, etc. You can do that by having her read the classics and complete novel studies, so she's thinking about those elements. I agree poetry study would be beneficial for her. When she's older you can find a creative writing course for her. This is really awesome. 

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