Please Post WWS assignments here!

[kbpaulie]

I am NOT a writer. That s probably the greatest area I struggle w/ in homeschooling.  And how do you balance a boy who is trying to be creative, learning writing skills, and me?  So, some feedback, please.

 

DS 11yo

WWS1 13.4 - Write descriptively about a volcano. 

 

Put on your fire-proof suit, ‘cause we’re going inside a

VOLCANO!!!!!!!!!!!!

       A volcano starts in the magma chamber. This is essentially a giant bathtub of molten rock, sometimes being thousands of feet underground. So, let’s take a “bath†and see what happens. Do I hear your stomach rumbling? Oh no. She’s gonna’ blow! When enough pressure builds up magma and ashes are released through the vent where they are shot thousands of feet or even miles into the air. Hey, we’re flying! If these ash clouds (or us) get high enough, winds can carry them all over the earth, blocking light, and changing the climate. Cough! This stuff smells nasty, like puke and rotten eggs.  Ahh! Prepare for impact!

       Now that we’re back on the ground, let’s see what the volcano looks like. Volcanoes form themselves over the years, building up many sheets of hardened lava and ash. With every eruption that occurs, more layers are compressed on. You say it looks like a zebra? Hey, you’re right.  As the layers build up volcanoes will take on many different shapes, most of which have a large crater in the center.

 

Thanks for joining us, check out our next tour, an

Earthship!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Chrysalis Academy]

:lol:  I think it's great, actually! It does say to write *descriptively* about a volcano, and he certainly does.  I would praise his extremely vivid imagery.

 

I might take the opportunity to talk to him about tone and audience.  Maybe I'd ask him what audience he had in mind when he wrote this, and how he might write it differently if he were writing it to a very different audience.  But I wouldn't rain on his exuberant parade here! I think as long as a kid understands voice/tone, and that different ones are different for different audiences, there is no reason that everything they write needs to be in a formal academic tone.

 

 

[Chrysalis Academy]

Ok, coming back to WWS to do the Poetry section about a year later . . .  here is Dd11's week 32 literary analysis

 

“The Bells†by Edgar Allan Poe

                “The Bells†by Edgar Allan Poe is a poem about the path of life, and Poe uses the symbol of bells to represent it. A symbol is a word or a thing that means both itself and something else, like a rose is a rose, but in a poem a rose might also mean youth or love. In this poem the bells are bells, but they also represent life.  At first glance this poem seems to just be about bells, but when you dig a little deeper you will uncover the symbolic meaning.  

                The bells in the first stanza are silver sleigh bells which represent childhood.  Silver isn’t as expensive as other metals, but it is still valuable, just as youth is valuable, but not as important as other phases of life.  The silver bells are merry and delighted, like children at play.  The poem uses i-sounds, cheerful verbs such as “twinkle†and phrases like “jingling and tinkling†to make us think about childhood.

                The bells in the second stanza are gold wedding bells, and they represent marriage.  Gold is the most valuable metal, and marriage is usually the most important part of life.  The wedding bells are happy, yet more grown up than the “tinkling†silver bells.  This represents the beginning of a happy adult life.  This stanza uses harmonious “o†and “oo†sounds and calm, sweet words like “gloat†and “tune†and “moon†to show us the feelings involved with the knitting of two souls.

                The bells in the third stanza are brass alarm bells.  Brass is much less valuable than both silver and gold, and these bells represents old age.  These bells are terrified, like the feeling you get when you start to see gray hairs, and can’t do things that used to be easy. This stanza uses sharp “ang†and “ee†sounds and words like “clang†and “shriek†to warn us about the fright of old age.

                The bells in the fourth stanza are iron funeral bells, and they represent death.  The long o sounds and mournful words such as “groan†and “moan†and “tolling†are used in this stanza to create the doleful and forlorn feelings of a funeral.

[Chrysalis Academy]

Week 33: Ozymandias.  We took some liberties with this assignment: she clicked with the irony bit way more than with the Italian vs. English sonnet structure - so I let her write about the aspect of the poem she found most interesting.  We are working on Intros & Conclusions, so that was a focus here, too.

 

Ozymandias

                Have you ever heard of Ozymandias? Neither had I until I read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem.  In this poem, Shelley is trying to show us that nothing lasts forever, life is ephemeral, and we are all going to die and be forgotten someday.

                Shelley uses irony to show us how Ozymandias thinks that his name and fame will last forever, but the reality is that no one has ever heard of him, and his statue is only a ruined wreck in a vast uninhabited desert.

                Shelley uses multiple voices that come between Ozymandias and the reader.  Ozymandias speaks to the sculptor, who writes on the stature, which is read by the traveler, who tells it to the narrator, and the poet, who hears it from the narrator, tells us.  This shows us the true powerlessness of Ozymandias, who believed that his own voice would last forever.

                We’d all like to think that we will live forever, or at least be remembered for something we’ve done, but the reality is that most of us will be forgotten just like Ozymandias.  I know that thought is a little depressing, but it should remind us to enjoy the life we have now while we are here to enjoy it, and not worry about being remembered forever.

[allyall]

This is DS 11's finished assignment for W11D4. He hand writes his first drafts, I help him edit them some and then he types up the final copy.

 

Life of Ivan the Terrible   

 

          Ivan the Terrible was crowned emperor or Tsar ( pronounced Zar) of Russia in 1547. Tsar is basically the Russian equivalent of the Roman title Caesar that means tyrant or dictator. Later in his rule Ivan seems particularly strong on the tyrant part of this title.     

        In 1552 Ivan built a cathedral to commemorate his conquering of the Tarter city Kazan. The cathedral itself looks like it has onions on top of the spires and also looks like a shaped candy wrapper mountain. It is brightly colored and has rounded tops on the spires.          

          During his rule as “the Terribleâ€, Ivan and his son had an argument about what clothing his son’s wife wore.   During the argument his son contradicted him and Ivan hit him in the head with an iron tipped staff which put his son in a coma for three days until he died. Three years later Ivan himself died suddenly while prepping for a game of chess.

[allyall]

DS 11, W12D4. I try not to edit too much and know it isn't perfect but it is his own work. Anway if it is super awful, tell me please. We took some time off from school at the end of May. I don't think it usually takes us 3 weeks to finish 1 week of writing assignments.

 

Description of a volcano

 

To begin my description of a volcano, I will start with lava. Lava is molten rock which is formed below ground at thousands of degrees of heat. The difference between magma and lava is that lava is above the ground and magma is below the ground. The word lava comes from the Latin word lavarae which means to wash away. Lava washes away or destroys everything that stands in its path. When lava has cooled and solidified it is called a lava bank.

          The ash cloud is what happens to the heavier debris and is considered to be the most dangerous part of the volcano eruption due to its capability to kill millions of people because the ashes can go up to 1000 milies in great quantities. The ash can bury anything that is not 5 feet high near the eruptions. It can also mummify, choke, and crush people who are not both careful and cautious.

          The layers of a volcano are kind of like the layer on a cake and onion. The top layer is rock which has been lava before so it is igneous rock, the second layer is ash which has been there since the last eruption because of the ash cloud. Both of these layers repeat all the way down to the bottom of the volcano.                                                      

[Chrysalis Academy]

It's not super awful at all!  It's good.  Have you given him much feedback already?  If you have, I'd just let it stand.  If you haven't, my approach is usually to pick one thing to comment on (after praising, sincerely, something I like - vivid word choice, or something.)  So in this case, I might comment that it's not necessary to begin a description by saying "to begin my description" - just jump right in and start describing!   Pick one thing that he could improve, and just that one thing - if you do that with every assignment, just focus on improving one thing, he'll get a lot of feedback over the course of the year, but never feel picked on.  

 

Anyway, that's become my strategy - don't try to fix everything in every assignment, keep an eye on the big picture and see each assignment as one step in the journey.  Comment on something you like, and one thing that can be improved.  Then move on!   WWS is all about practice, practice, practice.

[ELaurie]

Ds 14 is a struggling writer with ADD / LD issues.

 

I don't know whether to be pleased with his progress this year, or wring my hands in despair. :001_unsure:

It took him hours to write this, and he used sources that are probably below grade level.

 

I did help him with some of the most glaring errors in his rough  draft, but I didn't require him to restructure the paragraphs.

 

I would appreciate your feedback.

 

WWS-35

Thomas Edison

 

During his life time, Thomas Edison registered over one thousand patents and made many inventions that have had a lasting impact on the world as we know it. We often take his inventions for granted today. Much of the technology we use today can be traced back to Edison’s inventions.

 

Thomas Alva Edison was born in 1847 in Milan Ohio. Edison was the youngest of seven children. From an early age, he began to lose his hearing; later in life he would become completely deaf. He attended school in a one room school house until one day his teacher told him there was something wrong with his brain and he couldn’t learn. His mother became very angry and took him out of school. She home schooled him from that point on. Edison was an inquisitive boy, spending lots of time out in nature and collecting samples of anything that interested him. From an early age Edison loved to experiment. He set up a make shift lab in the basement and did many experiments there.

 

When he was thirteen, he got a job selling news papers, magazines, candies, sandwiches and other goods to the passengers of the Grand Trunk Railway. He decided to publish is own newspaper called the Weekly Herald to sell to the passengers on the train. At the Grand Trunk Railway, there was a telegraph office. Even as a child, Edison had always been fascinated by the telegraph. One day the son of the station master was playing on the railroad tracks and Edison saved the boy from an oncoming train. The station master was so grateful that he offered to teach Edison telegraphy. After that Edison worked as a Telegraph operator at the Western Union telegraph office.

 

Edison’s first patent was a vote counter; the vote counter was a total failure. Edison’s idea was a good one. Edison knew that taking votes in congressional meetings was a long and inefficient process because he took notes at the meetings when he was a telegraph operator. He decided to make a machine to record the votes electronically. Most politicians didn’t want to make the voting process more efficient, they liked it take to a long time. Edison later said, "Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success."

 

Edison invented many other things. He invented an improved stock ticker. He also attempted to make a two way telegraph machine that could send two messages at once but it failed. He later successfully invented a machine that could transmit four telegraph signals at once. Edison invented an electric pen which could receive an electrical signal which was then translated onto a piece of paper. He invented the phonograph which was the first record player.

 

Edison improved upon Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone by improving the transmitter. Before Edison’s improvement, the transmitted signal was very weak. Whoever was talking on the phone had to shout just to be heard by the person on the other end of the line. Edison’s telephone used a carbon button for the transmitter which was much more effective than the previous design. He invented the lightbulb, the generator needed to power it, and all the components needed to light a house or a city.

 

The hardest thing about inventing the light bulb was finding a long lasting filament to use. The challenge was to find a filament that would burn long enough to make the light bulb practical. The filament is the part of a light bulb that actually burns; the challenge was not to find something that would emit light. Edison ended up using carbonized thread for the filament. Edison’s first bulb burned for more than thirteen hours.

 

He also invented the Kinetoscope which was a predecessor to the projector. It looked like a chest height box with a handle on the side that could be turned. On the top of the box there was a lens that the viewer could look through. Inside there would be a wheel with a series of pictures on it. When the handle was turned, the wheel spun and it made something that looked very much like a movie. He then began to sell the Vitascope which was one of the first projectors.

 

Edison came up with the idea for the phonograph when he was working on a device to record telegraph messages. The first phonograph used a needle to cut impressions in wax covered paper cylinders. The impressions were read by a stylus which would vibrate a diaphragm. The night Edison invented a working phonograph he went to visit the president so he could demonstrate his invention. The first family was so fascinated by his invention that Edison showed off his invention until half past three in the morning. Later Edison would change from using paper to record the sounds on foil to make the indentations because the foil was more durable. Much later in his life Edison changed from making his recordings on cylinders to discs. Edison stubbornly used cylinders for many years because they had a cleaner sound than discs, but the discs allowed a longer recording to be put on them than the cylinders, and eventually he had to admit that the public wanted the disc records more.

 

It’s hard to imagine what our world would be like today without Edison’s inventions. Each time we turn on a light, listen to a CD player, or talk on the phone we have Edison to thank. The idea for our televisions originated with Edison. Batteries power everything from IPods to cars. What would Edison think if he could see how far his inventions have progressed?

 

 

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

[tmstranger]

Well, I know this is an old thread, but I have 100% enjoyed reading through it! My ds is almost 12 and in 6th grade.  He had little writing instruction in public school, did a combo of IEW and CAP last year, but he disliked both and is a very reluctant writer. 

 

This is his week 14/d4 writing:

 

Mars is the fourth planet from the sun. Mars has a diameter of 4,200 miles.  A Martian year is 686 days and every day is twenty-four hours and 37 minutes almost like Earth. Mars’ dusty atmosphere is made out of nearly all carbon dioxide.

 

Mars is very different from Earth. You will see the red cold surface of Mars is covered in huge red dust clouds. In the North, Pole there is hard, blue frozen ice about two kilometers thick. That’s a long way down! The cold gets through your shoes and makes your feet freeze. Dust gets in your eyes and stings really bad making it very hard to see. The wind and dust is blowing past at over 40 miles per hour. It stinks like iron all over because the dust is made out of iron oxide. There are huge craters over 3 miles deep. Volcanos erupt spraying lava that atleast makes you warm.

 

Mars is a cold planet. The weather on Mars is like a four season snow globe changing all the time. So much that at summer it can reach up too 78.8 degrees Fahrenheit but in winter almost -230.8 Fahrenheit that is cold enough to nearly kill you and it can easily give you frost bite in a matter of minutes.

 

He is very resistant to feedback from me, so if anyone still reads this thread and would like to offer him some feedback, I would appreciate that. 

Thanks.

[SanDiegoMom]

I'm bumping because my kids just started WWS a couple of months ago (half-time, we will finish by the end of fifth grade possibly...) and they just finished the Titanic. Unfortunately it's not super helpful, since one was determined to turn it into a letter from a survivor and the other decided to turn it into telegraphed updates all in present tense. Since they were so excited about it, I just let them tweak it...

 

They are 10 and fourth grade:

 

Dear Mum,

Hi. I’m still alive, so don’t worry. This is what happened to the Titanic.

 

 

On the Titanic, everyone was going about their normal business. Then an iceberg was sighted ahead at around 11:40. The lookouts immediately telephoned the first officer on the bridge, who ordered the ship turned to port, but it was too late. The ship collided with the iceberg 37 seconds after sighting. The edge of the iceberg was sharp, and it cut the right side of the ship open. We didn’t think there was any danger. It was the Unsinkable, after all. There were passengers on deck that even started to play with the ice chunks from the iceberg.

The ship began to flood. The officers on board told the passengers that there was no danger.

“Oh, no, nothing at all. Just a mere nothing. We just hit an iceberg.â€

The captain realized that the ship was sinking. The shipbuilder told the captain that the ship would sink in approximately 1 ½ hours.

Captain Smith said, “Give the command for all the passengers to be on deck with their life-belts on.†They started lowering the lifeboats. But the lifeboats could only carry half of the passengers on the Titanic.

 

The ship sank between 2:05 and 2:20 AM. The stern of the ship rose above the water. Then, horrified, we watched the ship split completely in half. The front section sank, falling into the sea. The Stern rose back up in the water, like a whale coming up for a breath. Finally, it sank at 2:20 AM. But only one lifeboat returned for the people still in the water.

 

 

Your (alive) son,

Ivan

 

And DS, having much trouble trying to navigate between past and present tense:

 

 

The Titanic

 

April 14, 1912

 

We have sent a cruise ship to Canada. It is called the Titanic, and nicknamed The Unsinkable. There are about 2,222 people on board.

An iceberg has been detected in Titanic’s path. It is 11:40 p.m. Now, 37 seconds later, it has collided. Its sharp edge has slashed open the starboard side of the ship.

 

 

The ship is now flooding. The officers don’t want to worry the passengers, so they tell them that there is no danger, saying: “Oh, no, nothing at all, nothing all. Just a mere nothing. We just hit an iceberg.†Five separate compartments have been flooded, so they have started the pumps in the sixth compartment. The pumps can remove 2,000 tons of water per hour, but unfortunately 24,000 tons of water are going in per hour.

 

 

The captain has realized that the ship is sinking. The shipbuilder, Thomas Andrews, told him that the ship would sink one and a half hours. Unfortunately, the lifeboats can only carry half of the passengers on the Titanic. The second officer, Charles Lightoller, asks the Captain for permission to fill boats. “Hadn’t we better get the women and children into the boats, sir?†So that’s what they did starting at 12:25 a.m.

 

 

It is now April 15th, and the ship is sinking. It is 2:05 a.m. and the propellers have risen above the water. The first funnel of the ship just fell into the wall. The Water is breaking windows and flooding the bridge, and the stern of the ship just rose above the water.

 

 

Now at 2:18 the electricity has failed. The second funnel fell, the ship split in half, and the bow section sank. The stern rose back up into the water, and then sank at 2:20 a.m. But only one lifeboat returned for the people in the water.

 

We will remember this event forever. Many people died bravely this day, in the sinking of the Unsinkable.