IEW Questions

[Gamom3]

How does this help the children?

Doing Dress-ups..how does this help? Does this help with future writing assignments?

 

How is this going to help someone teach writing when that someone knows nothing about writing?

 

How does it help you grade the papers?

 

 

 

Do I need the TWSS? What is it for?

Do the SWI cover the same thing as the TWSS?

 

Is there another curriculum out there that teaches about the same way?

[Janis in DE]

Let's see if I can answer some of your questions. The TWSS teaches you how to teach writing. The SWI is Andrew teaching your children instead of you implementing what you learned in the TWSS yourself. You would need the SWI and the SWIC to cover everything taught in the TWSS. All you really need is the TWSS to implement the program. But many moms have trouble implementing the program without lesson plans. They do offer some really good lesson plans for about $25 that will plan out all 9 units taught in the TWSS. I think it is easy to grade an IEW paper. The student is required to provide a check list of certain things required in the paper. They get points for each of the required items that they complete. As for how the dress ups help, they have to use better adjectives, adverbs, phrases and clauses. This helps to vary their writing. It can seem a little forced at first, but I think in the long run it helps the student improve their writing. I like how it teaches the student to make outline from which to write papers. They teach different ways to get the information for the outlines depending upon the type of paper they are writing. This program has really helped me to learn how to teach writing in a systematic way.

Janis in DE

[Sue G in PA]

and I was surprised to see I had jotted down that SWB said that IEW was a good program but SKIP the dress-ups! I had been wondering the same thing you are and when I saw that I thought, "Aha!". So we don't do them much. As for what to buy...there was a thread that I had started asking the same thing. I *think* the advice was to get the TWSS OR the SWI. I couldn't afford either so I got one of the theme based books (Anc. Hist. Based Writing Lessons) which basically takes your dc through each of the 9 units covered in the TWSS. Very helpful and very reasonably prices!

[SBP]

The dress-ups, sentence openers, decorations, etc. all help the children become better writers by explicitly teaching them more sophisticated writing patterns than kids are generally apt to use. Yes, some children write this way intuitively, but I would venture to say that most don't. IEW teaches the "dress-up" and then requires the children to practice it until it becomes easy and natural to them.

 

The results are sometimes a little clunky and overwritten, especially when they're trying to cram a bunch of dress-ups and decorations into a fairly short paragraph. However, my kids like the checklist because it takes what might be a bewildering, rather abstract assignment - "Write me a great paragraph on X" - and makes it concrete and quantifiable: Write me a paragraph on X that has 1 -ly word, 1 quality adjective, 1 sentence that begins with a prepositional phrase, etc. This also makes it easy to grade because it's simple for the mom/teacher to skim the paper and see that the objectives for the assignment have been met.

 

I personally wouldn't want to teach IEW without having been through TWSS, which is a DVD seminar on teaching IEW. It's directed at the parent/teacher rather than at the children. I believe teaching without TWSS could be done, especially if you used one of Verstegen's writing lessons books, but I think if I'd tried to do it that way I would have always felt frustrated and a little confused - like the big picture was still obscure. I know others have done it, though, so obviously mileage varies.

 

I haven't seen or used the SWI's so I'll let someone else address that :).

 

I really like IEW, but it wasn't love at first sight. I'm a fairly intuitive writer, and the forced dress-ups and decorations felt very awkward to me at first. I might not have stuck with the program had we not been using it in a co-op setting. However, I'm now seeing that when my DD8 writes a paragraph, she's automatically including many of the dress-ups and decorations she's learned. She'll finish typing it and just go back through and start underlining things - "...that can be my quality adjective...and look, there's my -ly sentence opener... and if I change this just a little I'll have a short sentence..." Her first-drafts are so much more sophisticated than they used to be, and I credit IEW with that.

 

Hope something here helps :)

 

SBP

[Heather in VA]

[quote name=SBP;104656

 

I really like IEW' date=' but it wasn't love at first sight. I'm a fairly intuitive writer, and the forced dress-ups and decorations felt very awkward to me at first. I might not have stuck with the program had we not been using it in a co-op setting. However, I'm now seeing that when my DD8 writes a paragraph, she's automatically including many of the dress-ups and decorations she's learned. She'll finish typing it and just go back through and start underlining things - "...that can be my quality adjective...and look, there's my -ly sentence opener... and if I change this just a little I'll have a short sentence..." Her first-drafts are so much more sophisticated than they used to be, and I credit IEW with that.

 

Hope something here helps :)

 

SBP

 

Are you finding that the lessons are translating over to her other writing as well or primarily her IEW lessons? I'm having an issue with a dd who does very well in her writing lessons but not as well when she's doing non-fiction writing for other subjects.

 

Thanks

[SBP]

Are you finding that the lessons are translating over to her other writing as well or primarily her IEW lessons?

 

Well, I use the IEW format with every subject. So this week, for instance, their official IEW assignment for co-op was from the Medieval History Writing Lessons book, but when I assigned a short report on Thomas Edison for science, we still went through the IEW process - fused outline, topic sentence/clincher, rough draft, required dress-ups, etc. I want them to learn to approach every writing assignment that way, so I'm trying to take them through that process in as many subjects as possible.

 

However, my guess is that if I didn't force the IEW structure and style rules on them, they would both show some improvement in style but maybe less in structure. The structure - being able to organize their thoughts clearly and concisely - seems to be taking longer to click, maybe because at 8 and 10 they're not quite logic stage yet.

 

I hope that answers your question :).

 

SBP