Need WT 1 Advice

[2squared]

We progressing fairly smoothly with WT1, but now our pace has almost come to a screeching halt. The stories are longer now, and my 9yo dd is taking 3+ days to rewrite them. She is overwhelmed at the length of the stories, so we are spending a day outlining a portion and having her rewrite that portion the following day. This process is taking forever. I don't want to have to outline the story, but having the outline calms her. Without it, she panics and doesn't make any progress.

 

Do other kids crank these stories out in a day or two? Even chunked up, this is the most writing I've ever gotten her to do in a day without panic.

 

Has anyone else had similar issues? Did you continue through at a slow pace and see your dc make progress? Did you switch to something more structured - like IEW? I just don't know how to help her get over this mindblock. She can do the work, but she gets overwhelmed so easily.

 

We switched to WT after completing 1/2 of WWE 3. Maybe we should go back to that and continue moving her oh-so-slowly into writing a 3 sentence narration? I just really, really want her to have enough confidence to write more than a couple sentences at a time.

 

:confused:

[nikkid]

We used Writing Tales 1 at the beginning of this year and had to stop since I got it for more fun than for our main curriculum (MCT/AAS/WWE). My dd loves to write stories and ate up the writing in the beginning, but when I started putting my foot down about needing to write a draft and then a final with all grammar and spelling fixed it became drudgery. After about two months the newness wore off and although she still loved listening to the stories and creating her own, we felt so pressured to stick to the schedule since we don't school year-round and may not be homeschooling next year. Since we had other curriculum that we were using for our main thing, we decided to shelve this until later.

 

That may not be what you need to hear. Just wanted to let you know we did find the writing to be too much too fast, even with my dd who LOVES to write pages and pages. She just doesn't love to REwrite pages and pages of what she's already written to fix mistakes. We could have just done drafts and not worried about grammar (use it as a creative writing curriculum instead of grammar/spelling since we're already doing other things) but in the end we just didn't have enough time to really do it justice. So maybe we'll write stories over the summer.

 

Good luck to you!