Writing Tales similar to IEW?

[Mommamia]

I was looking at WT and realized that it reminds me of IEW (with the rewriting of stories, etc). Is it truly similar?

 

If you have tried WT, did you like it?

[Tess in the Burbs]

We just finished WT I last week. We have looked at IEW but have never used it.

 

I liked WT in the beginning. It has grammar lessons each week that the story is used to learn from. There is review week to week on the previous grammar. In WT I it's noun/verb/pronoun/etc/etc. It's light and we still did another grammar program while doing WT.

 

My ds did not love this program but our agreement was he had to do writing and this was our pick. The first week is the grammar, reading the story, retelling the story and either sentence strips or grammar games or both. At the end of the week you rewrite the story using your own words. The stories do get longer pretty quick and that upset my son early on. The second week you rewrite the story making one or two changes(they give suggestions), making changes as needed. And also do a final copy. We put ours into a notebook only for writing to keep. The changes could be just naming the characters. Both my kids made huge rewrites to at least one story but they soon learned that changes often made it longer and they started wanting to do the minimum :tongue_smilie: I can't blame them. That second week of writing the story out twice was brutal. Some stories were 6 pages(single line) for my son!

 

We are taking a break next year and will be using R&S for grammar and whatever writing is in there. We will pick up IEW the following year.

 

It would be easy enough to take some children's stories and rewrite them without a program. The grammar wasn't strong enough IMO to stand alone. I did appreciate the vocabulary look up and spelling days to reinforce those skills but again, it's something you could do at home on your own.

 

My kids got bored with WT. My ds did the entire book but not in a year span. He did about half last year and finished up the other half just now...so more than half this year spent on it. My dd only did about 12 lessons but I am letting her off the hook. She writes on her own daily.

 

I believe you can just watch the student videos and implement IEW in your studies or use one of their theme guides to align the writing to your studies. We hope it will be more fun than WT.

 

I think WT did help my ds write. But the format got old and he learned not to write as much b/c he didn't want to be copying it over that second week twice :lol: Can't blame him. He doesn't type yet and the one attempt of me doing it took away the part of catching your spelling/mistakes.

 

Also, the grammar days, spelling days, vocab days, copywork days are easily combined. We usually did WT 3 days a week instead of 5. Keep in mind the days you write the story are much longer than the days you only do a short grammar or spelling thing. So one day could be 5 minutes and the next day an hour. The games....my kids loved them. Simple, simple, simple. But they loved them. I got tired of them and started letting them do them on their own. It's part of the learning but I personally didn't care one bit. But even friends liked the play grammar games at our house. Who knew Kaboom was such a hit :D:tongue_smilie:

 

HTH

[Mommamia]

Thank you. Your input was very helpful!

[nansk]

Writing Tales 1 and 2 are most like Classical Writing Aesop. I have WT1 and like it very much, although I haven't used it with my child yet.