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getting beyond one paragraph writing


happycc
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Prior to WWE my kids were in ps and writing reams of paper now since we started WWE last year the writing amount decreased to just one paragraph. However their writing now makes sense.

How do I get them to go beyond one paragraph and learn to see when it is time to make a new paragraph?

 

We are on WWE 3 right now.

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Is this for the ten year olds? We use the WWE principles in our school work, but for my ds10 I also have 2-3 multi-paragraph reports planned for the year. We did something similar last year. I have ds pick a high-interest subject and encourage him to pick his own books. He reads them and I teach him basic note-taking skills. We then work through the paper, essentially treating each paragraph as a narration. We edit together, talking about sentence flow and writing conventions. I then type up the finished product and out it in his binder.

 

This is a multi-week, teacher-intensive process. The first week is reading and note-taking. In the second week, he writes a narration every day. For the third, we edit. Throughout the time period, I sit with him and discuss the steps. He really enjoys the finished product, although I wouldn't say the writing process is always smooth. The key for my ds is to pick a topic he really enjoys so he doesn't get bogged down by boredom. Last year, he picked planes, football, and dinosaurs. I haven't assigned a paper yet this year, though I think he wants to do a report on the planets.

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I actually *don't* feel like this was taught very explicitly at the beginning of WWS. In the first week, she does define paragraphs and topic sentences, but she really doesn't go into, or have them practice explicitly, how and when to start a new paragraph. It's something dd is struggling a bit with in doing longer essays. She just finished the Ivan the Terrible assignment (week 11) and her essay had about 6 one or two sentence paragraphs. After editing, we consolidated it down into 3 solid paragraphs. But I haven't seen anything in WWS that really explicitly teaches the kid how to do this.

 

MCT's Paragraph Town, which we are working through concurrently with WWS, is helping - we're on Lesson 8 of 20, and it's starting to address paragraphing skills explicitly, also how to connect paragraphs together so that each one logically stems from and/or leads toward the next.

 

It kind of makes me shake my head that I'm having such a hard time articulating this clearly - it's one of those things that you just know how to do, and do it automatically, at some point, but how to make it explicit to a kid so you can teach it? If anyone has any good, straightforward (but not overly formulaic) resources, I'm :bigear: (although I'm pretty happy with what we are covering in MCT, so that might be enough).

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Rose, that makes me glad I'm using IEW inbetween WWE and WWS. My son just learned last week how to rewrite a story in 3 paragraphs, with each paragraph focusing on a specific thing.

 

Sometimes formulas help kids get from not being able to write to being able to write. The key is to not require the formula forever more. I know some pubic schools teach paragraphs as 5 exact sentences, but that doesn't mean all formulas have to be abandoned. Just use them wisely. :)

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I actually *don't* feel like this was taught very explicitly at the beginning of WWS. In the first week, she does define paragraphs and topic sentences, but she really doesn't go into, or have them practice explicitly, how and when to start a new paragraph. It's something dd is struggling a bit with in doing longer essays. She just finished the Ivan the Terrible assignment (week 11) and her essay had about 6 one or two sentence paragraphs. After editing, we consolidated it down into 3 solid paragraphs. But I haven't seen anything in WWS that really explicitly teaches the kid how to do this.

 

MCT's Paragraph Town, which we are working through concurrently with WWS, is helping - we're on Lesson 8 of 20, and it's starting to address paragraphing skills explicitly, also how to connect paragraphs together so that each one logically stems from and/or leads toward the next.

 

It kind of makes me shake my head that I'm having such a hard time articulating this clearly - it's one of those things that you just know how to do, and do it automatically, at some point, but how to make it explicit to a kid so you can teach it? If anyone has any good, straightforward (but not overly formulaic) resources, I'm :bigear: (although I'm pretty happy with what we are covering in MCT, so that might be enough).

 

Keeping in mind that I have never even seen WWS or Paragraph Town, here are my suggestions.

 

Fwiw, I wouldn't teach essay writing prior to paragraph and multiple paragraph mastery. Essay writing is a more sophisticated writing process requiring the student to develop argument and incorporate supporting evidence vs. simply informing via something like a report.

 

Via report writing, teaching multiple paragraphs is a simple process. The simplest method is to use a topic that can be broken into very specific sub-topics. Initially have your student simply write 1 paragraph per sub-topic. Then after they have written topic sentence/supporting details for the individual paragraphs, work w/them to write a topic paragraph which introduces each paragraph's sub-topic. Then work with them to show how incorporating transition sentences and transition words connects thoughts together. And finally how to summarize/conclude.

 

I work w/my kids through the process many times before I expect them to attempt it on their own. (We don't do like I described above more than once typically. After they understand the idea behind main ideas, etc, we normally approach it via an outline.)

 

Also, when my kids first start writing multiple paragraphs, I only give them a single source for their gathering info. After have a better grasp on it, I give them multiple sources and expect them to synthesize info from several sources into a single unified report.

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Keeping in mind that I have never even seen WWS or Paragraph Town, here are my suggestions.

 

Fwiw, I wouldn't teach essay writing prior to paragraph and multiple paragraph mastery. Essay writing is a more sophisticated writing process requiring the student to develop argument and incorporate supporting evidence vs. simply informing via something like a report.

 

Via report writing, teaching multiple paragraphs is a simple process. The simplest method is to use a topic that can be broken into very specific sub-topics. Initially have your student simply write 1 paragraph per sub-topic. Then after they have written topic sentence/supporting details for the individual paragraphs, work w/them to write a topic paragraph which introduces each paragraph's sub-topic. Then work with them to show how incorporating transition sentences and transition words connects thoughts together. And finally how to summarize/conclude.

 

I work w/my kids through the process many times before I expect them to attempt it on their own. (We don't do like I described above more than once typically. After they understand the idea behind main ideas, etc, we normally approach it via an outline.)

 

Also, when my kids first start writing multiple paragraphs, I only give them a single source for their gathering info. After have a better grasp on it, I give them multiple sources and expect them to synthesize info from several sources into a single unified report.

 

Yes, I miswrote: she isn't really writing essays in week 11 of WWS, it is really a report, so I don't think our cart is too far in front of the horse! ;)

 

Where she ran into trouble with the Ivan the Terrible report was in assessing the size of a "topic" - and this is where I don't think WWS was much help. So, in her first draft she had paragraphs covering each of the main points in her outline - Ivan's early years, becoming tsar, battles to expand Russia, building projects to celebrate his victories, decline in his later years, death and the chaos Russia was left in. These were each individual topics, but each only had 1-3 sentences. The sentences were fine, but the whole report looks and reads very choppy with such brief paragraphs. What I suggested was to group these into three broader topics (Ivan's early life, successes as tsar, decline & death) and with this new organization, the report fell into place, with three solid paragraphs of 4-9 sentences each. It was a good exercise, and she got the point, but I was having a hard time translating the intuitive sense that it just looked and read better this way into a rule that could be applied across situations (i.e. write about one thing till you are done, then start a new paragraph, or each outline main point gets its own paragraph).

 

This is my own struggle as a writing teacher, I guess. The reason I appreciate having a curriculum to follow is that I'm not confident enough that I'll be able to explicitly articulate all of the steps . . . but then when the curriculum does seem to spell out all the steps, we sometimes end up with something that feels very artificial, but it's hard to say why, because it did actually follow all the "rules" that the curriculum laid out.

 

What you've described here does make sense to me, and I will try to work with her on paragraphing longer reports this way.

 

I suppose the other choice would have been to send her back and make her include more content with each main outline point! That would have led to longer paragraphs . . . ;)

 

It's also helpful to be reminded that we need to be prepared to do this over and over with our kids, before expecting them to go off and do it naturally on their own, so thanks for that! :D

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Rose, that makes me glad I'm using IEW inbetween WWE and WWS. My son just learned last week how to rewrite a story in 3 paragraphs, with each paragraph focusing on a specific thing.

 

Sometimes formulas help kids get from not being able to write to being able to write. The key is to not require the formula forever more. I know some pubic schools teach paragraphs as 5 exact sentences, but that doesn't mean all formulas have to be abandoned. Just use them wisely. :)

 

Yes! I was very surprised too. We went from WWE3 to WWS, and I thought maybe I missed something, maybe it's taught in WWE4, but others have said it's not. It seems like kind of a big thing to gloss over? :001_huh:

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