Jump to content

Menu

Afterschooling / summer schooling writing course online?


Recommended Posts

DD11, currently a 7th grader in PS, is a voracious reader but a reluctant academic writer. I'm trying to identify an online course that will help her improve her writing skills, at her request.

 

Organization is a relative weakness for her; she has a hard time knowing how to get the information in her head onto paper, and her writing tends to be disorganized. She has decent mechanics when given the specific task of identifying and correcting grammatical and punctuation errors. She cannot summarize at all - if you give her three sentences and ask her to summarize them, she will still be talking five minutes later. Her creative writing done for pleasure tends to be much more coherent and well-organized, so I think there's also an element of performance anxiety that interferes with academic writing.

 

Up until now, her school writing has been graded primarily on content, and she's bright enough that her teachers have attributed any obvious weakness to lack of effort, rather than lack of skill. DD generally picks things up fast enough that she ignores big chunks of direct instruction, so I have some sympathy for the "lack of effort" perspective. But middle school teachers expect organization and coherence and proofreading, and it's getting to be too much to fake.

 

DD is painfully aware of her difficulty with writing for school, so much so that she's even willing to let me help. But she and I are not compatible like that; we butt heads and no one enjoys a single moment and it takes 3 hours to edit 30 short sentences for grammar / punctuation / clarity and at the end each of us is ready to beat the other with sticks. She has taken two online courses before (MCT's Grammar Island and a Minecraft class involving modifying some snippets of Java) and enjoyed both content and format.

 

I'd like to find an online course that:

- improves the quality and quantity of her written output

- has lots of instructor feedback

- does not require more than 2-3 hours a week for a slow-to-average student during the school year, if a school year program

- is flexible enough to accommodate multi-week breaks, if a summer program

- does not result in a final grade or any sort of official transcript / credit; assignment grades and/or a final narrative evaluation are acceptable

- is 100% secular, where "the Bible covered as just another piece of literature" would not be secular enough

 

Cost is unlikely to be an issue. DD has talent search scores high enough to qualify for most of the usual suspects, but talent search is not meant for remediation, and IMHO what she needs is rigorous bright-kid remediation. A self-paced program with suggested pacing would be a good match for her scheduling constraints. My best guess is that interaction with other kids in the class would be negative-to-neutral, even though she generally enjoys that interaction, because she is so self-conscious of bring unable to do things that seem to come easily to everyone else.

 

Thanks!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Online G3 have in the past done introduction to academic writing courses (or was it Athena'sAdvancedAcademy?). One of them anyway, I'm fairly sure they are secular enough provided you don't take a subject in which the Bible is an essential document such as ancient history or a lot of literature.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...