WWE Shutdowns Occurring

[acat]

My 9 year old daughter with mild autism is having major attitude issues with Writing with Ease. She has cleverly renamed it Writing Disease.:glare: She is starting to shut down and become inarticulate whenever we have to do a narrative summary.

 

I am gathering opinions. Should I discard the book entirely or temporarily? Should I try another writing program? We are using Sonlight Readers grade 4; should I just use the Language Arts program that goes with it?

 

Today, she voluntarily gave me an excellent summary from her SL reader, but seemed unable to recall anything after the WWE exercise. IMO this is an issue with anxiety shutting her brain down, not with actual ability. We have also made some changes to her diet and routine she does not like. I wonder is she might be trying to find an area to exert control. Maybe some of you have had similar experiences?

[scrapbookbuzz]

I don't have any words of wisdom, unfortunately. I just wanted to let you know that people are, in fact, reading your post. The only thing I can think of is if the dietary changes were recent changes, that might be a contributing factor. I'm interested in hearing what others have to say, as well.

[kokotg]

My oldest had similar problems with WWE, and he never really got past it. We finally gave up last year, but we were also doing MCT Town level, so I felt fine dropping it. I did have him do written summaries on his own from SOTW, and, oddly, he was fine with that. By the end of the year he was easily producing two paragraph summaries of each section without any help from me at all. I'm not sure how much of it was just maturity and how much taking out the step of him telling me the narrations somehow helped. And now he's three weeks in to Writing with Skill and is doing fine with it. He's a bit of a puzzle.

[Gailmegan]

Sounds like my ds#1.

 

We went through some dietary changes to eliminate wheat and I have to say that while his body was detoxing from the wheat his behavior got worse, but was much, much, much better after a few weeks. So hang in there until her body adjusts to the changes.

 

As for WWE, we went through periods of him HATING it too. Just pulling out the book would bring on a tantrum. In those times I just used the basic principles of narration and dictation through some other subjects. I'm curious, does she have the same reaction for the fiction sections as she does with the non-fiction sections? My son wouldn't have nearly as much trouble working with narrative summaries when the reading held his interest. If the reading was too hard, he was struggling to understand each word, so he lost the big picture of what the sample was about. If I took a step back and made the reading a little easier (or more interesting to him) while working on the narration skills, then I could step back up to reading that was more challenging.

[acat]

Sounds like my ds#1.

 

We went through some dietary changes to eliminate wheat and I have to say that while his body was detoxing from the wheat his behavior got worse, but was much, much, much better after a few weeks. So hang in there until her body adjusts to the changes.

 

As for WWE, we went through periods of him HATING it too. Just pulling out the book would bring on a tantrum. In those times I just used the basic principles of narration and dictation through some other subjects. I'm curious, does she have the same reaction for the fiction sections as she does with the non-fiction sections? My son wouldn't have nearly as much trouble working with narrative summaries when the reading held his interest. If the reading was too hard, he was struggling to understand each word, so he lost the big picture of what the sample was about. If I took a step back and made the reading a little easier (or more interesting to him) while working on the narration skills, then I could step back up to reading that was more challenging.

 

Yes! I think it is the nonfiction narratives she struggles most with.

 

We gave up gluten 10 years ago (actually for my husband). Now we are working on dairy. We forced her to make a choice between medication and nasty tasting Chinese herbs for her severe Tourette's. She finally chose the herbs after being a zombie for three days on medication. She's still stewing over it, though.

[Gailmegan]

Yes! I think it is the nonfiction narratives she struggles most with.

 

We gave up gluten 10 years ago (actually for my husband). Now we are working on dairy. We forced her to make a choice between medication and nasty tasting Chinese herbs for her severe Tourette's. She finally chose the herbs after being a zombie for three days on medication. She's still stewing over it, though.

 

I'm sure it's not easy for her. She probably is detoxing from the dairy, as well as getting used to the herbs (we were going to cut out dairy if the wheat wasn't enough, but thankfully it was). I would definitely cut her some slack for a few weeks. And definitely just work on hard skills separately. Work on narration/summaries with easier reading and work on harder reading separately. Then when she's stronger with each you can try combining them again.

[EKS]

I used WWE with my younger son for a semester. He grew to hate it because he wanted to do what he called "real writing." So we stopped using it and I had him write about the topics in history and science we were studying.