Is writing the homeschooling "weak spot"?

[Jenny in GA]

This may sound strange, but I sometimes visit teacher forums to get ideas and see what school classrooms are doing (both good and bad.)

 

I was surprised to see a discussion about grade level expectations about writing. Supposedly, a second grader should be able to write a two-paragraph report/essay , a third grader should write three-paragraphs, etc.

 

Well, no way can my third grader write three paragraphs on her own. Try three sentences -- and guaranteed several words will be spelled wrong.

 

The public school teachers talk about something called "Writer's Workshop," which I believe is an hour and a half a day, a few times a week, that the kids spend working on their original writing -- brainstorming, proofreading, revising, etc. I've heard them say that even kindergarteners can write 1-2 well thought out sentences in their journals.

 

I know we certainly don't spend 3-5 hours a week on creative writing/journal writing.

 

Well, this alone could just say that I'm a crummy parent, or my kid is a crummy writer, or both.

 

BUT I can easily think of three homeschooling friends of mine who say they have to pull teeth just to get their ten year olds to write a few sentences.

 

Sooo ...

 

This is all basically just an intro to ask:

 

* In general, do you think homeschoolers don't emphasize or practice writing skills as much as they should? As much as the public schools?

 

* Is having a 6, 7, or 8 year old write in a journal regularly an important thing? Could it be a bad thing, and if so, how?

 

* If anybody knows more about it, can someone explain what the general approach to elementary school writing is in the schools? What is "writer's workshop" all about, and does anyone here do something like that at home?

 

* Any other thoughts about learning writing skills, or what those skills "should" be as certain grade levels?

 

Discuss ...

 

Jenny

[NanceXToo]

Hm. Well. My daughter was in public school for second grade and most of third and she was never asked to write essays or to write in specific numbers of paragraphs in those grades, that I know of. (Though I think they did sometimes do journal writing).

 

She is now doing the Oak Meadow fourth grade curriculum at age 9, and it has her keeping a daily journal. And it mentions that in third grade they "sometimes" did journal entries, not daily like they do this year.

 

And this year was when we started reading about three, five and eight sentence paragraphs and she'd be encouraged to use those as she learned about them when she did some sort of book report or something. And this year was when it started saying mid year that she should begin proofreading her entries etc. So these were not things that were really introduced prior to fourth grade much.

 

This seems soon enough for me. She doesn't love doing a lot of handwriting right now as it is- her hand gets tired/crampish- and I don't blame her because so does mine if *I* try to do much handwriting. Which I never do because 1) I can't even read my own poor handwriting haha and 2) seriously, who needs to?! In this day of computers and printers and emails it's probably more important for them to learn decent typing skills than it is for them to have to do a lot of writing by hand. (Which is not to say they shouldn't know HOW to write of course! -But in 2nd grade, x number of paragraph essays? Hardly!)

 

And I don't make her do LONG journal entries. I'm not looking to make her miserable.

 

As for creative writing, sometimes I'll do "word pool" type things with her and we'll sit down together and make up poems based on those word pool words, and we'll do that by hand. But if she wants to do some sort of story or some such, it's always on the computer. And sometimes (since she hasn't made it all the way through typing lessons yet and is still slow at it) she will just dictate to me and I will type it for her. Either way she's still being creative! I have no problem with that.

[The Girls' Mom]

When my girls were in PS (up until 3rd grade for the twins, 6th for my oldest), writer's workshop was a huge part of their work. However, the quality isn't quite what they make it out to be. There was a lot of creative spelling, grammar was never corrected, etc. A great deal of it was copy work too. The thing the girls liked best was 'publishing' their work. This was usually just their writing typed out and stapled together.

That said, the quality of writing coming out of PS graduates is dismal. I've had the privilege of seeing what college students are writing, and it is a little scary. I don't think you have to worry too much about being behind them.

For us, I have certain goals for my girls to reach before they can graduate. One is to be able to write a paper, and write coherently in general. If we accomplish that, then I count us as a step ahead of their PS counterparts.

[Renee in NC]

As someone who has a child who has always been in school, I can say that while writing expectations were much higher than what TWTM espouses for the younger grades, the quality of writing was poor. There has been almost no writing instruction and little grammar. Spelling was not really taught other than random words related to whatever they were studying at the time (and later from the Wordly Wise books.) Not only that, but I can guarantee you that students taught TWTM way of writing will turn out to be much better writers than my ds is at the end of the 11th grade. This isn't to bash his writing, but rather to say that TWTM method is far superior.

 

I will stress writing more with my younger children than I have with my 12yo. I do think it can be a weak point because I am more likely to "give in" to young boys who don't want to write. This is a mistake I won't make again.

 

Let me also say that those 3-5 hours per week are not spent diligently writing by any of those children.;) More likely that there is a lot of playing and distraction going on, as well as writing. Is the teacher giving any instruction beyond "a beginning, 2 middles, and an end?" (This was the rubric for the NC state 4th grade writing test 10 years ago!)

 

I think the proof is in the end - while those kindergarteners may be churning out sentences now, where will they be in 12 years? Are the ps turning out competent writers in the end? What about homeschoolers? That is what is more important, I think - the end result.

[Aggie]

My sister is a 2nd grade teacher. She was telling me her expectations for her students' writing and I was quite shocked....very similar to what you've heard. A one page report on an animal! yikes

 

However, my sis can't tell me that she's taught them the basics. Do her students know what the parts of speech are? How to write a *good* sentence? The kinds of sentences? How to write a topic sentence? How to write a paragraph? Nope.

 

No wonder she's so frustrated!

 

Somehow, these poor kids are supposed to write their brilliant ideas/stories down without knowing the basics of writing. To me, a math teacher, it's like letting kids do algebra "their way" just to get them use to working with numbers.

 

I don't think homeschoolers are completely dropping the ball. Many of us here are teaching the foundations of writing first, as SWB suggests. :) My 4th grader is just now writing topic sentences and titles. My middle schoolers are really into writing now and do well, but because they have a great foundation in grammar.

 

Just my 2cents....

 

ETA: About creativity...my kids are very creative. They act out their own stories in their play, plays, and art. I don't feel a need to have them write out a story. Seems a waste of time and energy. :)

Edited April 29, 2010 by Aggie

[jenL]

Well, since I student taught in 5th grade, and we were working on a solid 5-7 sentence paragraph, I am doubtful that 3rd graders are consistently writing 3 paragraphs in all schools! Then I taught 8th grade Language Arts for many years, and we worked them hard to get a cohesive 5-paragraph essay.

 

I have heard writing is a weakness in homeschooling; however, from what I know about the school I was in, local schools where I now live (1000 miles from where I taught) where I have friends who teach ranging from grades 2-7, and from what parents discuss in regards to what their own children are doing in public and private schools, I'd be willing to say writing is a weakness everywhere! However, some may beg to differ...

[Mrs Mungo]

Jenny, have you listened to SWB's audio lectures? She discusses writing, including creative writing. Those lectures might really help you and they are available on the PHP website. You could also listen to Andrew Pudewa's lectures (I'm sure they are online, somewhere). He has some different ideas (and there are some things I strongly disagree with him on), but I think it shows some of the different perspectives. Nearly all of them say-forcing kids to do creative writing is a bad thing. If kids are born creative writers, then you won't need to require it.

 

eta: I do tend to agree with others that learning to write an essay is different and it *is* an important skill. I also agree that it tends to be a weakness in all groups.

Edited April 29, 2010 by Mrs Mungo

[elegantlion]

There are others more qualified to answer, so I'll just add a few comments and observations.

 

Journaling and learning to write well are two different things, imo. Creative writing is fun for me, even in school, but writing of a research paper, essay, etc, required a different mentality. It was using different skills beyond good grammatical skills.

 

In the last month I've picked up some college writing texts from the thrift stores. After some research I found they are used at our local college for Freshman Eng 101 and 102. I was surprised at what was included in these books, as it seems like skills that should have been taught in high school. These were texts written by one of the local professors so she is obviously writing to fill a need, one that isn't being met in the high schools here.

 

Another text appears to be a college remedial level. It's something I could easily see using for ds in 8th or 9th grade, and most likely will.

 

When I first started reading the high school board, writing is the one skill that seems to be stressed as most necessary regardless of what subject was being discussed. Since then I've placed a high importance on making sure ds learns to write well, which does not mean journaling.

[Sputterduck]

In my school (private) we wrote full reports in second grade. I still have mine. I did one on bees and it is about 12 pages (with pictures and sloppy writing which take up a lot of extra room). It has a table of contents, a title page, and introduction, and a conclusion, as well as all the content on bees. Writing, along with grammar, was a huge emphasis in my school. I don't see why homeschoolers can't accomplish the same thing.

Edited April 29, 2010 by Sputterduck

[FaithManor]

In our public schools, a great deal is made about how much their elementary aged kids write. However, its all hot air! If we define writing as in coherently putting together random sentence fragments with numerous spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors as good quality writing, then yeah...they "write" two or three paragraphs per day.

 

Many schools have adopted a no grade, no imput approach to writing. Just get them doing it is the philosophy with some magical hope that at some point, they'll start implementing what they should be learning in their Language Arts books. It has been a dismal failure but it is a life raft that is clung to with tenacity.

 

Much of the writing consists of journaling and story writing. Not essays and I would question any PS that is saying 2nd and 3rd graders write essays in class, to produce some examples. I'd just love to see what qualifies as an essay. This is especially true where we live because the bulk of the PS high school students in our church youth group (large group) attend the local ps and can not produce a coherent sentence regardless of their extreme efforts much less an all out essay.

 

It's hard to write paragraphs and children shouldn't be pushed into it early. I'd much rather see the them focus on consistently writing decent sentences with proper punctuation and capitalization until that becomes "second nature" then go into a more abstract kind of writing without thoroughly conquering the fundamentals.

 

And this opinion is brought to you by FaithManor, the woman with three children that have no problems writing and the one child who could reduce even the most saintly English teacher to a catatonic, drooling state! (Thank goodness for 4-H because ds discovered that he could enter short stories - he's got a great imagination - and though I have never been able to motivate him, this got him to seriously put thoughts to paper and actually pay attention to the rules of English Grammar!!!!!)

 

Faith

[BMW]

A couple of my guys were in public school at that time... in 3rd grade they were writing solid paragraphs regularly. They knew "topic sentence and three supporting details and a conclusion" quite well. In 4th grade my son's class is writing 4 paragraph reports. In 5th grade my son did a report which was several pages long with different headings, with each section having topic paragraphs, supporting paragraphs and concluding paragraphs. This particular report took about 6 weeks, included a cover, table of contents and bibliography.

 

My homeschool kids for those years knew how to write good, solid paragraphs in 3rd grade as well, but we didn't do formal research reports like my 5th grader until 6th grade.

 

I think reading and writing were strong parts of my homeschooling... along with solid math skills at grade level. Now... science was definately on the back burner many weeks... and history was all about read alouds and fun topics until middle school.

 

I doubt that it can be looked at as an "across the board" weak spot. It varies from family to family, priorities and some years life may hit harder and we can struggle with the basics (like an illness or birth or death, etc.)

[Snickerdoodle]

Jenny, have you listened to SWB's audio lectures?

 

I second this.

[LizzyBee]

Public schools these days have expectations that are not realistic. When my middle child was in kindergarten - yes KINDERGARTEN - her teacher decided she was lazy because she wouldn't (couldn't) compose and write 3 sentences. One time when I was talking to dd, I told her she could ask for help if she couldn't spell a word she wanted to use, and she emphatically said, "Oh no, we have to do it independently." I just cannot tell you how livid I was by the end of that school year.

 

One time when I was in her classroom, a boy wrote a beautiful complex sentence. The teacher told him that it was a very good sentence, but she wanted him to write 3 short sentences. IOW, they write plenty, but quality has been sacrificed.

 

When my oldest dd returned to ps, I asked a freshman English teacher what my dd needed to be capable of by the time school started. Essay, research paper? You could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard the teacher's response: "She just needs to know basic grammar. All the schools that feed into this school concentrate on creative writing, so when they come into ninth grade we assume they know nothing. We review grammar, then teach the 5-paragraph essay. In 10th grade, we expand that to the 10-paragraph essay, and then 25 paragraphs in 11th grade."

 

And the final outcome? A homeschool graduate I know was asked by her college writing professor if she was homeschooled. When she said yes, he said he could tell by the quality of her writing. In his experience, homeschooling produces better writers than the ps.

Edited April 29, 2010 by LizzyBee

[Parrothead]

I think what you described is overkill. As SWB says in her book more writing does not a writer make. Are the kids getting technical instruction? Or are they simply writing for the sake of writing? Especially creative writing. The only people who are good at that are the ones who have a story to tell. It can't be forced.

[LizzyBee]

 

Much of the writing consists of journaling and story writing. Not essays and I would question any PS that is saying 2nd and 3rd graders write essays in class, to produce some examples. I'd just love to see what qualifies as an essay.

 

 

 

I agree! When I was in school, an essay was a reasoned opinion paper that few students are capable of before high school. Same with term/research papers. We wrote "reports" but not research papers before high school.

[Dandelion]

I don't have any experience with having my kids in public school (and I myself went through the German school system so don't have a reference point from my own school experience either).

 

However, writing is OUR toughest subject (with DS 6.5). It's the only thing he regularly balks at - it's a daily struggle and his skills in this area are still very basic. I've looked at the grade-level expectations for public school and have had the same questions as the OP (DS is definitely NOT on par with those expectations when it comes to writing - although he's ahead in all other subjects).

 

Somewhere along the way I read some advice that said to just stick with it and make sure you do some writing practice on a daily basis - and EVENTUALLY, they'll get it. So even though DS is not on par with the standard expectations right now, I feel confident that he'll get there. That's the beauty of homeschooling, right? We can tailor our approach to each individual child.

[La Condessa]

I specifically remember writing a three-paragraph persuasive essay in third grade. It was basically a fill-in-the-blank exercise. Paragraph 1: Attention Getter Sentence (we were given a list of examples, and the teacher helped you come up with your own version. Next, Thesis statement, which had to be in the form of "This paper will show that _________, through __________, _________, and ________. Paragraph 2 was three sentences, each one stating in different wording exactly what the thesis had said that it would say. Paragraph 3 was the conclusion, and had to restate again what we had just stated twice in new words (in two sentences, because one sentence did not count as a paragraph).

 

I remember because I kept getting in trouble for varying from the formula. I would do things like include subpoints for my arguments, or offer a defense for an obvious counterargument, or include two or four supporting ideas when that was the number of good arguments I could see for the thesis.

 

It didn't take long for me to decide that I hated writing. It wasn't until years later that I discovered that I love writing; I'd just never been allowed to do any before that.

[Mejane]

I think what you described is overkill. As SWB says in her book more writing does not a writer make. Are the kids getting technical instruction? Or are they simply writing for the sake of writing? Especially creative writing. The only people who are good at that are the ones who have a story to tell. It can't be forced.

 

Yes! As with anything, quantity does not equal quality. We don't do a lot of formal writing here - mea culpa, I hate teaching it - but what we do is well thought out and worked over.

 

Like Apryl H, I've seen college writing and it is mostly awful. Not only is there no style, but very little technical ability. I believe it speaks to the fact that there is very little reading of good literature, as well as little or poor instruction in the basics of writing.

[Crissy]

I don't know about other homeschoolers, but writing is one of *my* weak spots. I am a terrible writer so I have always worried about teaching my boys how to communicate well on paper.

 

I believe a consistent focus on grammar has been helpful. We use Rod and Staff English. In addition to their excellent grammar instruction, I feel both of my boys made good progress with the writing lessons.

They also follow TWTM's writing procedure for history and science.

 

Another thing that I notice has been helpful to my older son is his Logic study. It is important that he be able to organize his thoughts into a coherent argument, and he is doing quite well on that front these days.

 

He recently took the SAT for the first time and scored 700 on the writing portion. What a relief! I didn't ruin him completely. :)

[bettyandbob]

I think it is possible for a lot of students to achieve what the op described and I think there are public school teachers who have an environment that encourages students to do that.

 

That said my oldest never could have met the 2d and 3d grade benchmarks--he has fine motor problems and dysgraphia. After a combination of home school and an accelerated private school he entered public high school last year. He takes all IB (international bacalureate) or preIB classes and his writing has taken off. IB has a much bigger emphasis on writing than AP, which is why I prefer it. Anyway, ds came into his own when he was ready.

 

My youngest has always been in public school. He has disabilities, but is included in regular classrooms with support. He had an incredibly gifted K teacher. The kids wrote every day. Additionally, she had a specific journal time weekly. She had different expectations for each of 22 students. I volunteered in her class the year before she had my son, so I got to see her in action. There were K students in her class who were writing 2 pages on their journal topic and there were K students who were drawing a very simple picture and putting 3 words underneath. She met each student at his or her level and moved them along from there. I could definitely see that some of those K students would easily meet the 2d and 3d grade benchmarks.

 

I don't think the expectation is that 2d and 3d grade writing is "good writing". I think the emphasis is on production. Having watched my oldest develop, I think production was one of his biggest hurdles. He certainly was a mastery of grammar and has never misspelled anything (unlike me). But he struggled to put 3 novel sentences down on paper through grade 7. When I had him home in 8th, I had him write every day. I had him write something significant (at least a page) for at least 2 subjects every day. Until then, he never wrote enough to edit and organize. I think having the kids be able to just produce something is a significant hurdle. Once the student produces, I think it's easier to teach how to organize. JMHO

[myfunnybunch]

* In general, do you think homeschoolers don't emphasize or practice writing skills as much as they should? As much as the public schools?

 

I don't really have a firm sense for what other homeschoolers are doing as far as writing. I can speak to my own experience, though. I was worried about the same issue when I heard what my ps neighbor's child was doing in school for writing. My oldest ds is a year ahead, age-wise, and was writing far less, at least as a separate subject or activity. A friend had a similar experience when she joined Classical Conversations; there was a huge jump in the amount of writing her dd was expected to do.

 

I do know that writing is the most difficult subject for me to teach, so I was neglecting it a little. My friend said the same thing of herself. I did two things. I found a writing curriculum that works well for me as a teacher and for my ds (for example, he sometimes struggles with thinking of what to write, and this curriculum addresses that issue) and have committed to using it diligently this year. And I looked at the amount of overall writing my ds was doing, particularly writing and copywork for science or history, and found that he was still writing significantly less, but the difference wasn't as big as I'd feared.

 

* Is having a 6, 7, or 8 year old write in a journal regularly an important thing? Could it be a bad thing, and if so, how?

 

I'm interested in responses to this question too. Having a school journal is one of those, "I should probably try that" things that I never seem to get around to trying with the boys.

 

I suppose it could be counter-productive if it was never checked for proper spelling and grammar (I don't believe in allowing kids to practice bad habits, at least in school work) or if it was something the kids hated and were forced to do.

 

* If anybody knows more about it, can someone explain what the general approach to elementary school writing is in the schools? What is "writer's workshop" all about, and does anyone here do something like that at home?

 

I don't know about a "writer's workshop." But I do wonder if, at least in part, the more and more writing at younger ages is a part of the current trend in schools to push more academics into lower grades in general. Poor writing scores among high schoolers must mean that children are not learning to write properly, so let's do more writing in elementary school with younger students. Practice makes perfect, I suppose, but if they're not given a firm grasp of the mechanics of writing then they're merely "perfecting" mistakes and poor writing skills. I'm not unsympathetic. Writing is one of our most teacher-intensive subjects, and I can't imagine teaching 30+ students the way I'm able to teach my ds.

 

* Any other thoughts about learning writing skills, or what those skills "should" be as certain grade levels?

 

My thoughts, again from my own experience:

Now I'm glad I waited and focused on reading, reading a lot, and I'm glad that we focused more on the mechanics of writing. I gradually start formally teaching grammar and spelling and vocabulary in the first and second grade years, with some writing thrown in when we have time, and add writing as a separate subject in third grade. My ds is a good writer, and I think it's helped that he had time to learn some of the basics and practice them in specific contexts (writing science experiments, re-telling a history reading, copying memory work) before he was expected to really write.

 

Cat

[Halcyon]

I think creative and essay writing is important, which is why we started using Writing Strands 3 with my 7 year old, along with WWE. I emphasize quality over quantity, however. I expect each sentence to be properly written: correct spelling, grammar and punctuation. I also work with him on creating enticing, descriptive sentences. We also use WWE simultaneously, which helps him compose his thoughts into coherent, structured mini-paragraphs.

 

WS is already introduicng topic sentences and conclusions; I think combined with WWE, and the occasional brief, 3 paragraph research paper on topics of interest (my son recently spent 2 weeks researching pandas), we're covering our bases. I don't mind that we're not "getting through" the material at a faster pace. I am happy my son's writing is improving.

 

There are examples on my blog, and I will be posting more this week.

Edited April 29, 2010 by Halcyon

[Terabith]

I have wondered if I should be doing more writing with my children.

 

Anna, who is six, does handwriting practice and occassional writing in things like Explode the Code workbooks. She does not do writing yet. We'll start Writing with Ease next year when she is technically first grade.

 

However, my youngest, Catherine is attending preschool three days a week. (Her birthday was yesterday, so she just turned five.) Her teacher is wonderful, a former kindergarten teacher, and just does a ton of work with them, including writing.

 

You could have knocked me over with a feather. She has the preschool class doing writing. They draw a picture and then (with help) write a sentence about it. So, the other day Catherine drew a picture of a flower and wrote, "The flower has blue petals." The teacher sits with them and talks about how the sentence starts with a capital letter. (Of course, the writing winds up being a hodgepodge of capital and lowercase letters throughout, but I think that is fair at 4-5 years of age.) She has them tell her what they want to say, and then she helps them stretch each word to hear the sounds. She tells them unfamiliar things. So Catherine spelled "the" on her own because they have talked about how to spell/ read "the." I've taught her the phonetics behind it, but she doesn't really "get" the multiletter phonograms so in practice the is a sight word for her. Then Catherine stretched out flower. She knew it started with a f, and then a l. She wasn't sure how to spell "ow" so the teacher wrote those letters for her and said, "when o and w are together, often they make the sound ow. Like when s and h are together they say sh." Then Catherine wrote R, because she was fairly confident that that was what the sound was. Ms. Mary Catherine told her that r and also be spelled er. For "is" she knew it started with an i, and then a z. She told her that it is actually spelled with an s. Catherine got mad because she doesn't like that, but she was told that s can say s or z. Then Catherine sounded out "petals." She spelled it petls. She ended it with a period. (Funny looking and floating in space, granted.) But for a four year old, I think that's okay.

 

I have to say that I think all the stretching and writing has helped Catherine's reading, even if the spelling is not 100% standard. It's made me think that maybe I should have Anna do some of that. Catherine is more confident than Anna is at writing things she wants.

[KidsHappen]

I am planning on bringing my 5th grader home for 6th grade next year and this is my biggest area of concern. When my older ones were young, I never found a lower level writing program that I was happy with and now that I have been out of the market for awhile and haven't done much research yet, I am not really sure what I am going to use for next year. I know that for all of my kids that did a year or more in PS, writing was their weak spot. They were really good with reading, spelling, grammar, vocabulary, math, science and history. But we really had to work on writing to get the kids where the schools wanted them to be. The thing that really bothered me though is that I think they just gave the assignments but didn't actually evaluate the work. I mentioned before that I sometimes felt like throwing random sentences in their work just to see if the teachers would notice. So I think that it is one of their benchmarks but it is not being adequately taught in PS either. I think that it is a weak spot for Americans in general.

[LND1218]

My sister is a 2nd grade teacher. She was telling me her expectations for her students' writing and I was quite shocked....very similar to what you've heard. A one page report on an animal! yikes

 

However, my sis can't tell me that she's taught them the basics. Do her students know what the parts of speech are? How to write a *good* sentence? The kinds of sentences? How to write a topic sentence? How to write a paragraph? Nope.

 

No wonder she's so frustrated!

 

Somehow, these poor kids are supposed to write their brilliant ideas/stories down without knowing the basics of writing. To me, a math teacher, it's like letting kids do algebra "their way" just to get them use to working with numbers.

 

I don't think homeschoolers are completely dropping the ball. Many of us here are teaching the foundations of writing first, as SWB suggests. :) My 4th grader is just now writing topic sentences and titles. My middle schoolers are really into writing now and do well, but because they have a great foundation in grammar.

 

Just my 2cents....

 

ETA: About creativity...my kids are very creative. They act out their own stories in their play, plays, and art. I don't feel a need to have them write out a story. Seems a waste of time and energy. :)

 

Writing isn't a weakness here - but it may be for some.

 

The above is my experience as well. I have been tutoring a friend's daughter who is in PS (6th.) And while she writes more and longer papers/essays and reports than my daughter. My dd's are a much higher quality, and she knows what to do. M's papers are a train wreck! They are the same age. She doesn't know what makes up a sentence or the parts of speech or anything.

 

I said something about her subject in a sentence - she said that can't be a subject because it's a noun. :001_huh: So I make sure I call them subject nouns. But then she thought all nouns were also subjects. I tried to explain that nouns have different jobs in a sentence - nothing..... She can't spell, write quality sentences or identify anything other than a noun and verb. And get this - she was placed in the advanced class. She can write a decent length paper, and she is very creative. She may write everyday, but her papers are horrible! I can't imagine what the regular class is doing.

[kathkath]

I was a 1st grade ps teacher for 8 years, and from reading these boards it does appear that there is a discrepancy between public school *standards* and what I hear those on the boards are doing. Of course there are going to be stories about hot air and such, but at least in my experience kids were expected to do a lot in the ps I taught. They did rise to the occasion. You can't compare apples to oranges though. If you were to take your children, with your level of parent involvement, and put them in a good ps situation, they would probably meet and exceed those expectations. Of course there are going to be kids in every class that can't make the grade. There are other variables going on, and it's not fair to the kids or the ps teachers to compare kids coming from different situations to your own.

 

I don't think children should be expected to write X many sentences at Y time. Children ought to be taught as they are ready, and expected to take the next step, whatever that may be. It appears that SWB's lecture encourages many homeschoolers to put writing on the back burner, and I think that is unfortunate. There are a million reasons to include writing, but people get so held up on spelling and grammar that they can't see the forest for the trees.

 

When our babies learned to talk, they started with words that didn't sound right. Most of the world could not understand them but we mothers would smile, repeat what they meant correctly, and encourage them in the next step of their development. When they said things like "me go home," we didn't say their grammar is so poor we must not focus on talking until later. We worked with them. I don't think writing is any different. Sure, when kids start writing, they don't spell well or use correct grammar. We gently show them the next step that they are ready for and expect that in their writing from that point forward.

 

So for a beginning writer, good expectations would be to put a capital at the beginning and a period at the end. As spelling words are learned throughout the year, you make a list of them in a place of reference, and by golly when you go over their journal they must have those spelled right or go back and fix them. If the word "Constantinople" is in there at age 6, don't bother unless your kid is dying to learn it. In the same way we don't nitpick their behavior at 18 months, we judiciously choose what is important and within their reach and work on that. Beginning grammar is approached that way as well. If you've covered it in First Language Lessons, then you talk about it when it shows up in their journal.

 

The mark of true learning is when a child can apply it in a new context. The daily journal is a perfect opportunity for children to demonstrate their learning in a new context. It can be a way for you to gauge how you are doing as a teacher and to know what to circle back around and hit again. I think people are afraid to see a misspelled word and leave it alone. I think people are also afraid that if their children see a word spelled wrong then they'll see it like that and forever spell it wrong. In my experience with 6 and 7 year olds, that is not a problem. Kids who struggle with spelling tend to struggle no matter what you do. Kids who are good spellers are good spellers. When done well, journaling is a high-interest activity that can maximize their interest and increase chances that they'll actually retain and use what you teach them. I hope that some of you will at least consider learning about it and trying it, rather than rubber-stamping it *no* just because of what some people say.

 

Journal writing in the younger grades can be such a precious memory maker, and was one of my favorite parts of teaching first grade. It can be such a joyous part of learning.

 

Writing is a way of clarifying thinking and making sense of what has been learned.

 

I'm speaking about journal writing in the primary grades here. I can't comment on the upper grades.

 

Another benefit of journaling is that the working through of letters and sounds supports reading development, which helps speed that up.

Edited April 29, 2010 by kathkath

[kathkath]

I dislike early writing. I dont think it is developmentally appropriate or beneficial to ask 7 yo kids to put together 3 complex skills (penning, composition and thinking) at an early age. I think its completely doable for an older child to pick it up quickly if he has grown up in a literature rich environment. Early narration is far preferable IMO to actual pen and paper reports and the like.

 

Why?

[Rosie_0801]

* Is having a 6, 7, or 8 year old write in a journal regularly an important thing? Could it be a bad thing, and if so, how?

 

The only journaling I expect I'll ever ask my kids to do is keep a science journal. I hated the "what did you do on the weekend" journals and don't really understand how having to write something that isn't at all interesting (my weekends generally weren't!) is good practice in creative writing. I didn't like having to write personal information for a teacher to read either. I think a science journal will give the kids something purposeful to write about and I can think of enough good reasons to do it to justify my expectations that they do it! I think that is going to be important with my daughter :glare: :001_smile:

 

Rosie

[spradlin02]

In my school (private) we wrote full reports in second grade. I still have mine. I did one on bees and it is about 12 pages (with pictures and sloppy writing which take up a lot of extra room). It has a table of contents, a title page, and introduction, and a conclusion, as well as all the content on bees. Writing, along with grammar, was a huge emphasis in my school. I don't see why homeschoolers can't accomplish the same thing.

 

I value highly the ability to write and it's an important skill I wish for my children to learn (because I write not so good). Do you remember how much time you spent at it? Was it connected to something you found interesting? Were the expectations continued into later years and did it come at the price of other subjects?

[SusanAR]

I haven't read the other posts, but I haighly recommend SWB's lectures on writing. She addresses ps, journaling, etc

 

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/store/audio-products/audio-lectures.html.

 

 

They are great to listen to when you begin questioning the WTM method, and they will calm your nerves and keep you focused:001_smile:

[spradlin02]

I was a 1st grade ps teacher for 8 years, and from reading these boards it does appear that there is a discrepancy between public school *standards* and what I hear those on the boards are doing. Of course there are going to be stories about hot air and such, but at least in my experience kids were expected to do a lot in the ps I taught. They did rise to the occasion. You can't compare apples to oranges though. If you were to take your children, with your level of parent involvement, and put them in a good ps situation, they would probably meet and exceed those expectations. Of course there are going to be kids in every class that can't make the grade. There are other variables going on, and it's not fair to the kids or the ps teachers to compare kids coming from different situations to your own.

 

I don't think children should be expected to write X many sentences at Y time. Children ought to be taught as they are ready, and expected to take the next step, whatever that may be. It appears that SWB's lecture encourages many homeschoolers to put writing on the back burner, and I think that is unfortunate. There are a million reasons to include writing, but people get so held up on spelling and grammar that they can't see the forest for the trees.

 

When our babies learned to talk, they started with words that didn't sound right. Most of the world could not understand them but we mothers would smile, repeat what they meant correctly, and encourage them in the next step of their development. When they said things like "me go home," we didn't say their grammar is so poor we must not focus on talking until later. We worked with them. I don't think writing is any different. Sure, when kids start writing, they don't spell well or use correct grammar. We gently show them the next step that they are ready for and expect that in their writing from that point forward.

 

So for a beginning writer, good expectations would be to put a capital at the beginning and a period at the end. As spelling words are learned throughout the year, you make a list of them in a place of reference, and by golly when you go over their journal they must have those spelled right or go back and fix them. If the word "Constantinople" is in there at age 6, don't bother unless your kid is dying to learn it. In the same way we don't nitpick their behavior at 18 months, we judiciously choose what is important and within their reach and work on that. Beginning grammar is approached that way as well. If you've covered it in First Language Lessons, then you talk about it when it shows up in their journal.

 

The mark of true learning is when a child can apply it in a new context. The daily journal is a perfect opportunity for children to demonstrate their learning in a new context. It can be a way for you to gauge how you are doing as a teacher and to know what to circle back around and hit again. I think people are afraid to see a misspelled word and leave it alone. I think people are also afraid that if their children see a word spelled wrong then they'll see it like that and forever spell it wrong. In my experience with 6 and 7 year olds, that is not a problem. Kids who struggle with spelling tend to struggle no matter what you do. Kids who are good spellers are good spellers. When done well, journaling is a high-interest activity that can maximize their interest and increase chances that they'll actually retain and use what you teach them. I hope that some of you will at least consider learning about it and trying it, rather than rubber-stamping it *no* just because of what some people say.

 

Journal writing in the younger grades can be such a precious memory maker, and was one of my favorite parts of teaching first grade. It can be such a joyous part of learning.

 

Writing is a way of clarifying thinking and making sense of what has been learned.

 

I'm speaking about journal writing in the primary grades here. I can't comment on the upper grades.

 

Another benefit of journaling is that the working through of letters and sounds supports reading development, which helps speed that up.

 

I agree with most of what I read, but I would emphatically add to teach them to love to write; find ways to get them to want to write. As we enter the age of IM, facebook and twitter, the ability to write and communicate well will be a highly valuable skill.

[lllll]

...

[MamaSheep]

(I haven't read all the responses yet.)

 

I cannot tell you how disgusted I am with the "writer's workshop" approach. Both of my kids were exposed to this sort of teaching during their short tenures at public school, and all it managed to do was to take my son, with the amazingly advanced vocabulary and innate sense of good grammar, and my daughter, who has an imagination any novelist would kill for, and convince both of them that they were hopelessly incompetent when it came to writing. It has been one of the major hurdles we've had to work on overcoming in our homeschooling--just climbing over that mountain of "but I can't write" and getting them both to even try.

[Wildiris]

I expect my first grader to write a five sentence paragraph, but it is a paragraph that she has dictates to me and we discuss the grammar and word choice etc. She then copies what she dictated to me as her paragraph. I think of it as writing with training wheels. I would not expect her to write in a journal or free write on her own. If she does, fantastic, but I don't push it.

 

I have 4 kids. Over the years I've spent countless hours one-on-one teaching them how to write. When they've gone into public school, writing is the one subject they're successful at and exceed their peers. The success come from the personal tutoring. I do not push creative writing, but we do it. I do not push journal writing at all. I think journal writing for English is much too personal to force on a student. I also think kids will come to it on their own.

 

Writing is a process, and it takes time to develop. I think teachers use the word "Workshop" to create the time in their day for these activities.

 

A 4th grader should be able to put together a simple three paragraph essay without too much assistance. I expect my 7th to regularly write 500 word essays (Read about one page of 3-5 paragraphs.), and be well versed in the different types of writing for use in all assignments.

 

To know what types of writing are expected at each grade level I follow my state's guidelines. It make my life easier. I also look at private schools across the country to get an idea of their expectations.

 

Finally, as a general observation, I do not think home school families emphasize writing enough. For me, I believe a formal reading/literature program, a formal writing program and a thorough grounding in grammar gives the student the tools they need to express themselves in writing. Sometimes it ebbs and sometimes it flows, but it always moves forward.

 

 

 

 

[Rosie_0801]

What you describe here sounds like overkill imo. I dont think your average fourth grader needs to be concerned with writing 3 paragraphs on anything unless they want to.

 

Perhaps she doesn't have average grade four kids :)

 

Rosie

[Wildiris]

It may seem like overkill, but I value literacy, so I don't think it is too much to expect a 4th grader to write a simple three paragraph essay.

Simple means using basic subject-verb-object sentence construction. Adjectives and adverbs could be sprinkled throughout the writing if the student understands how to use them correctly. To get a 4th grader to this point takes time and practice. In the same way math builds upon learned concepts, so too does writing.

 

If I waited for inspiration to stroke my child's imagination compelling them to want to do a school assignment I would be a very old woman before I saw a single assignment completed.

[kathkath]

Why is narration preferable? It allows a child to concentrate on word choice and composition without hampering them with spelling or actual writing skills. Writing and spelling require a whole lot from a child, developmentally.

 

I have a son who struggles with fine motor skills and who is also dyslexic so I really got a hard core education in these areas and how they mesh. Its amazing how you can take a child who can speak eloquently on many many topics but set him in front of a writing prompt and he'll look like a dunce.

 

For a child like yours I would agree it would be inappropriate to place high expectations on written work. That is one reason homeschooling can be so fabulous.

[Carol in Cal.]

It has given me a lot of ideas about how to encourage writing of various types. I don't use it very much, but it has been inspiring to me. Kind of like watching a cooking show--I don't do it very often, nor do I usually make one of their recipes, but when I do watch one, it always makes me want to cook something, and every once in a while I will use something I saw as a jumping off point for something I end up cooking.

 

The book I have is "Writing: Teachers and Children At Work" by Donald Graves. I do like it a lot for the stage after handwriting has been mastered but before major essay writing is required--maybe grades 2 through 5 or 6. But TWTM, The Writer's Jungle, and Writing Strands have been more helpful in my house.

[TechWife]

Supposedly, a second grader should be able to write a two-paragraph report/essay , a third grader should write three-paragraphs, etc.

My son wrote a 5 paragraph essay in private school second grade BUT it was a template paper. He basically did a fill in the blank with facts about his topic.

 

The public school teachers talk about something called "Writer's Workshop," which I believe is an hour and a half a day, a few times a week, that the kids spend working on their original writing -- brainstorming, proofreading, revising, etc. I've heard them say that even kindergartners can write 1-2 well thought out sentences in their journals.

This may be, but a Kindergarten student would write at the level of a K student. A well thought sentence out at the age of 5 does not equal a well thought out sentence at the age of 10, 12, 15, etc. The expectations are most likely "age appropriate" or "developmentally appropriate."

 

I know we certainly don't spend 3-5 hours a week on creative writing/journal writing.

In my humble opinion, you are doing the right thing. School is very girl oriented (I can't see your siggy right now so I don't know if you have boys, girls or both). Girls are more likely to go on and on about something when given a prompt like "Describe what you did last weekend." While boys will say "I played the Wii" and be done with it.

I also don't think that children know that much or have that much experience to write about anything. I mean really, they are so young.

 

BUT I can easily think of three homeschooling friends of mine who say they have to pull teeth just to get their ten year olds to write a few sentences.

Sounds right to me!

 

* In general, do you think homeschoolers don't emphasize or practice writing skills as much as they should? As much as the public schools?

This has not been my experience or observation. Home schoolers may wait until the student is a little older before they expect them to write, but from the writing programs I have seen directed towards the home school market, when they do start writing, they do so in a thorough and intentional manner.

 

* Is having a 6, 7, or 8 year old write in a journal regularly an important thing? Could it be a bad thing, and if so, how?

I don't think it is necessarily a good or a bad thing. Some students may enjoy the chance to express themselves, try out new words or relate their stories. For other students, it would be sheer torture and could very possibly turn them off to composition because they equate it with having to come up with all of their own ideas instead of realizing that there are many forms of writing -some of which they may enjoy more. Even when you teach about writing fiction, the student is taught about plot development before, during and after the writing process so that they can understand how to develop their own story.

 

* If anybody knows more about it, can someone explain what the general approach to elementary school writing is in the schools? What is "writer's workshop" all about, and does anyone here do something like that at home?

This is just my observation of the materials that are available to the public school market. There is a common thought process out there that says to be a good writer you must write a lot. While I do not disagree in theory (you have to practice any skill where you strive for competence), I think it is often taken overboard - requiring students to write anything w/out paying attention to the quality of the writing. Journal entries are not corrected for grammar, spelling, sentence structure, factual accuracy or their ability to tell a comprehensible story. Quantity is emphasized over quality.

 

* Any other thoughts about learning writing skills, or what those skills "should" be as certain grade levels?

I think this can be as individual as the student. There are probably notes on it in the "What your child should know in the .... grade" books, but again, you have to think about whether or not you agree w/the overall philosophy of the author of any book or program. Just because an "expert" said it doesn't make it the definitive answer.

 

Discuss

If I had to pick a weak spot for home school curriculum and emphasis, it would be the sciences, what I first thought of when I saw your thread title. Don't get me started on that, though:tongue_smilie:.

 

Good questions.

[TechWife]

I've placed a high importance on making sure ds learns to write well, which does not mean journaling.

:hurray:

[Rosie_0801]

I also don't think that children know that much or have that much experience to write about anything. I mean really, they are so young.

 

 

Or they have plenty of experience in being uninteresting to adults and don't see the point in slogging away to put something they know doesn't interest their audience, particularly if it doesn't interest them either, down on paper. Perhaps kids would respond better if the exercise was marketed as a writing exercise rather than a 'tell your teacher about your personal life' exercise. Or maybe only some kinds of kids. ;)

 

Rosie

[cjbeach]

I actually thought you were going to say science, like the PP stated. :)

 

I was actually impressed coming from a ps and private school background (for my children) at the amount of work homeschooling parents put into developing the writing skills of their children. When I first came to this board I remember reading about narrations, dictations, and then seeing so many posters use IEW and the like. My young children in their few years of schools were basically given papers and told to write without being instructed HOW to write, something that my Aspie kiddo cannot do without formal instruction. As a B&W kiddo writing is a gray area, WAY out of his comfort zone. My son needs a formula/a method/step-by-step directions to do the simplest tasks.

 

I did use Super Sentences (and EM product) in first grade for my son. Beyond that he needs instruction to progress. Journaling goes nowhere. We are doing WWE now and transitioning into IEW in Fall. My daughter could write on any topic from the start.

 

I think this is the point that so many poster have pointed out, yes PSs may write more but if you have a child like mine who cannot write without formal instruction, what is the use? What I did see of my son's writings in his journal were scripts (things he heard, memorized in his head, and wrote). :confused:

[LizzyBee]

It appears that SWB's lecture encourages many homeschoolers to put writing on the back burner, and I think that is unfortunate. There are a million reasons to include writing, but people get so held up on spelling and grammar that they can't see the forest for the trees.

 

I think you're misunderstanding SWB's approach. She doesn't advocate not writing in the early grades, but she does advocate teaching them in a manner that is developmentally appropriate. In fact, I think this is exactly what SWB teaches:

Children ought to be taught as they are ready, and expected to take the next step, whatever that may be.

[kathkath]

I also don't think that children know that much or have that much experience to write about anything. I mean really, they are so young.

 

:( I disagree. They have so much to say. They have so many experiences to draw from. Those experiences may not *seem* important to many of us, but they are significant. Putting them down on paper gives them importance and helps children to be heard.

 

When I taught 1st grade in ps, every year for Mother's day we did a huge writing project. As a class the children generated a list of things they wanted to know about their moms. I typed out the questions in categories with big lined spaces for note taking and we reviewed them ad-nauseum. For homework they were given a couple of weeks to ask their moms a few questions from each category and take notes. Depending on ability the mom would write the answer in words their child could read. Some kids would do all the writing. Some kids asked all the questions instead of just a fewlol. It was very open-ended to allow for student ability. (And that's a wonderful thing about teaching writing is that it is inherently focused on your child's level.)

 

The interest was there for ALL of them. They wanted to know this stuff--what their mom's favorite TV show was when she was a kid, what she was most proud of, how she met dad etc. Then we took that and did a series of writing lessons. This part took over a month. The end result was a simple illustrated biography of their mom's life and talk about why they loved their moms so much. It was a huge amount of work for us all, but the payoff was enormous for the kids and their mothers (and me vicariously!). THe most struggling children may have had 5 or 6 sentences in the whole book. Some of my more prolific writers (boys included) practically broke the binding machine, they had so much material! My point is that they had a LOT to say. Their writing was meaningful, had a purpose, and the kids learned. They could do it and they wanted to do it. Even my struggling kids still turned out a pretty book for their moms that brought happy tears to their eyes.

 

Yes writing is boring if you say "write about your weekend" every Monday.

[mcconnellboys]

I know that writing skills in my city are abysmal, despite what teachers say about what their protocols for writing might be.

[Guest]

Oh, you touched on my hot button topic here.

 

The writing workshop as it is now practiced in most -- not all -- schools is a brain child of Lucy Calkins, of Teachers College in NYC. There are basically two things going on.

 

First, in the 80s when I was in grad school there was a move to bring to college students a model of professional writing, a process writers used in the working world, to college papers. Instead of having them race through papers the night before, the idea was to introduce freshmen to the process of invention (thinking about it and coming up with a thesis), drafting, the "workshop" -- or having your writing evaluated by peers -- revising, and publication (in college students' cases, printing and turning in for a grade).

 

Second, Donald Graves and others experimented with having very young children do more and different kinds of writing than they had in traditional schools, writing in different genres, and writing across the curriculum. The idea was to introduce writing as a tool for learning and thinking, rather than just regurgitating reworded encyclopedia articles as "reports," and moving away from unimaginative, rote book reports and similar assignments in elementary school.

 

What Calkins did was combine these things, urging kids as young as kindergarteners to think of themselves as authors, bringing professional writers (mainly poets) into the classroom to read and discuss their work, and urging kids to write about themselves, a subject in which they were surely experts, in an attempt to build self-esteem and get kids to believe they had important things to share.

 

There were a lot of problems in implementing this kind of instruction into the classroom. Teachers in general take NO classes in how to teach writing in the process of getting their credentials, so she had to make the program pretty well teacher-proof; it has become more and more scripted so that teachers felt they had something to cling to. Classrooms have a lot of kids in them, so it's difficult for a teacher to get to everyone's work during the process of drafting. So every child became an "expert" in reading and responding, and kids began to exchange work so that the teacher would be able to help a few individuals per workshop hour. Revision, in the very early years, is largely a matter of spelling and punctuation.

 

There were also problems, I think, brought about by Calkins herself. For one thing, she has a very imbalanced focus on poetry, journaling, personal narrative, and memoirs for kids as young as five. Her teaching books are clearly on less firm ground when she gets to non-fiction writing; she doesn't really know what to do with it or how to go about it. She also has a really pressurized emphasis on publication. I remember reading in one of her books that kids shouldn't be allowed to use journals for "dead-end writing," which to her means writing that doesn't get polished up and published in some way or another. She tells a story about a third-grader with writer's block in the classroom going home and writing for hours under her blankets in bed, with a flashlight; to her this story is cute, but to me it speaks of the girl's desperate need not to have to share or rewrite or polish every single thing she writes.

 

What has happened is that the more Calkins becomes a guru, a writing personality, the more rigidly set and institutionalized her program becomes, so that the flexibility and emphasis on writing as a learning tool in the Donald Graves years becomes more limited and set in its ways, more of a one-size-fits-all way of having to write rather than a demonstration of different writerly methods to kids, from which they should be able to choose according to their temperaments, writing style, and the purpose at hand.

 

I can also tell you that writing every day does develop fluency (for non-dysgraphic kids); but that doesn't mean it develops anything else, like grammatical sense, critical thinking, organizing through language, or an understanding of structure. Most teachers remain pretty well untutored in writing theory and rhetoric themselves (not all; again, as some posters have noted, there are some really excellent public school teachers who know how to teach writing well. These are, however, a minority).

 

Any single-authored writing program is going to have its own biases, emphases, and rigidities (this way is the best way). I think it's important to take every formal program with a grain of salt, to understand that everything in it is not going to work well with every child. There are so many ways that professional writers work: some plunge in with a bare glimpse of an idea and draft their way, multiple times, through to some kind of understanding of where they are headed, while others do not set pen to paper until they've mapped out the entire thing in their minds. Others are in between. Some revise so much the original plot or content is practically gone by the time they're done, while others give their writing more of a simple tune-up. And writers also vary from work to work. The novelist Rumer Godden once spoke, revealingly, of novels that were just hard work, that she wrote and re-wrote, versus those that were "vouchsafed" to her -- I've also heard other writers talk of "taking dictation" from some mental source. Some share their work compulsively and their acknowledgement lists read like a really boring Academy Award speech, while others never show their drafts to anyone until the books are ready for the editor.

 

It's important for kids to know that such variety exists, that the point is to find a method or variety of methods that work for them in particular circumstances, that they will find themselves gravitating toward certain genres over others, and that many writing tasks can be taken on in a number of different ways.

 

And now I've told everybody much, much more than they ever wanted to know about where the whole workshop method came from, and I will stop so you can go pour a drink to recover.

[cjbeach]

Wow Karen! Thank you! Nice to have some inside info!

[kathkath]

Oh, you touched on my hot button topic here.

 

The writing workshop as it is now practiced in most -- not all -- schools is a brain child of Lucy Calkins, of Teachers College in NYC. There are basically two things going on.

 

First, in the 80s when I was in grad school there was a move to bring to college students a model of professional writing, a process writers used in the working world, to college papers. Instead of having them race through papers the night before, the idea was to introduce freshmen to the process of invention (thinking about it and coming up with a thesis), drafting, the "workshop" -- or having your writing evaluated by peers -- revising, and publication (in college students' cases, printing and turning in for a grade).

 

Second, Donald Graves and others experimented with having very young children do more and different kinds of writing than they had in traditional schools, writing in different genres, and writing across the curriculum. The idea was to introduce writing as a tool for learning and thinking, rather than just regurgitating reworded encyclopedia articles as "reports," and moving away from unimaginative, rote book reports and similar assignments in elementary school.

 

What Calkins did was combine these things, urging kids as young as kindergarteners to think of themselves as authors, bringing professional writers (mainly poets) into the classroom to read and discuss their work, and urging kids to write about themselves, a subject in which they were surely experts, in an attempt to build self-esteem and get kids to believe they had important things to share.

 

There were a lot of problems in implementing this kind of instruction into the classroom. Teachers in general take NO classes in how to teach writing in the process of getting their credentials, so she had to make the program pretty well teacher-proof; it has become more and more scripted so that teachers felt they had something to cling to. Classrooms have a lot of kids in them, so it's difficult for a teacher to get to everyone's work during the process of drafting. So every child became an "expert" in reading and responding, and kids began to exchange work so that the teacher would be able to help a few individuals per workshop hour. Revision, in the very early years, is largely a matter of spelling and punctuation.

 

There were also problems, I think, brought about by Calkins herself. For one thing, she has a very imbalanced focus on poetry, journaling, personal narrative, and memoirs for kids as young as five. Her teaching books are clearly on less firm ground when she gets to non-fiction writing; she doesn't really know what to do with it or how to go about it. She also has a really pressurized emphasis on publication. I remember reading in one of her books that kids shouldn't be allowed to use journals for "dead-end writing," which to her means writing that doesn't get polished up and published in some way or another. She tells a story about a third-grader with writer's block in the classroom going home and writing for hours under her blankets in bed, with a flashlight; to her this story is cute, but to me it speaks of the girl's desperate need not to have to share or rewrite or polish every single thing she writes.

 

What has happened is that the more Calkins becomes a guru, a writing personality, the more rigidly set and institutionalized her program becomes, so that the flexibility and emphasis on writing as a learning tool in the Donald Graves years becomes more limited and set in its ways, more of a one-size-fits-all way of having to write rather than a demonstration of different writerly methods to kids, from which they should be able to choose according to their temperaments, writing style, and the purpose at hand.

 

I can also tell you that writing every day does develop fluency (for non-dysgraphic kids); but that doesn't mean it develops anything else, like grammatical sense, critical thinking, organizing through language, or an understanding of structure. Most teachers remain pretty well untutored in writing theory and rhetoric themselves (not all; again, as some posters have noted, there are some really excellent public school teachers who know how to teach writing well. These are, however, a minority).

 

Any single-authored writing program is going to have its own biases, emphases, and rigidities (this way is the best way). I think it's important to take every formal program with a grain of salt, to understand that everything in it is not going to work well with every child. There are so many ways that professional writers work: some plunge in with a bare glimpse of an idea and draft their way, multiple times, through to some kind of understanding of where they are headed, while others do not set pen to paper until they've mapped out the entire thing in their minds. Others are in between. Some revise so much the original plot or content is practically gone by the time they're done, while others give their writing more of a simple tune-up. And writers also vary from work to work. The novelist Rumer Godden once spoke, revealingly, of novels that were just hard work, that she wrote and re-wrote, versus those that were "vouchsafed" to her -- I've also heard other writers talk of "taking dictation" from some mental source. Some share their work compulsively and their acknowledgement lists read like a really boring Academy Award speech, while others never show their drafts to anyone until the books are ready for the editor.

 

It's important for kids to know that such variety exists, that the point is to find a method or variety of methods that work for them in particular circumstances, that they will find themselves gravitating toward certain genres over others, and that many writing tasks can be taken on in a number of different ways.

 

And now I've told everybody much, much more than they ever wanted to know about where the whole workshop method came from, and I will stop so you can go pour a drink to recover.

 

Excellent! Thank you very much!

[kathkath]

I think you're misunderstanding SWB's approach. She doesn't advocate not writing in the early grades, but she does advocate teaching them in a manner that is developmentally appropriate. In fact, I think this is exactly what SWB teaches:

 

I guess then we disagree on what is developmentally appropriate?

[FairProspects]

:( I disagree. They have so much to say. They have so many experiences to draw from. Those experiences may not *seem* important to many of us, but they are significant. Putting them down on paper gives them importance and helps children to be heard.

 

When I taught 1st grade in ps, every year for Mother's day we did a huge writing project. As a class the children generated a list of things they wanted to know about their moms. I typed out the questions in categories with big lined spaces for note taking and we reviewed them ad-nauseum. For homework they were given a couple of weeks to ask their moms a few questions from each category and take notes. Depending on ability the mom would write the answer in words their child could read. Some kids would do all the writing. Some kids asked all the questions instead of just a fewlol. It was very open-ended to allow for student ability. (And that's a wonderful thing about teaching writing is that it is inherently focused on your child's level.)

 

The interest was there for ALL of them. They wanted to know this stuff--what their mom's favorite TV show was when she was a kid, what she was most proud of, how she met dad etc. Then we took that and did a series of writing lessons. This part took over a month. The end result was a simple illustrated biography of their mom's life and talk about why they loved their moms so much. It was a huge amount of work for us all, but the payoff was enormous for the kids and their mothers (and me vicariously!). THe most struggling children may have had 5 or 6 sentences in the whole book. Some of my more prolific writers (boys included) practically broke the binding machine, they had so much material! My point is that they had a LOT to say. Their writing was meaningful, had a purpose, and the kids learned. They could do it and they wanted to do it. Even my struggling kids still turned out a pretty book for their moms that brought happy tears to their eyes.

 

Yes writing is boring if you say "write about your weekend" every Monday.

 

Yes, but to me, this is a different type of project. This example does not force kids to come up with original content at the same time as mastering the skill of just "getting it down on paper" in sensory-motor planning, mechanics, spelling, etc.

 

The issue I have with "Writer's Workshop" format is that too often the projects force kids to do two skills at once (writing it all down on paper and creating original content) before they are ready. SWB's plan allows students the time to master the mechanics of language before asking them to come up with original material.

 

I think your project sounds wonderful, and would be a great way to just master the early basics of writing with spelling, grammar and punctuation as well as fitting right in with the WTM method of teaching writing.