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Well, my oldest is only the same age as yours, so I can't talk about older than 5th. But it has worked well for us. I saw dd10's writing improve a lot with the 4th grade R&S instructions. I like the way in 4th and up the composition lessons are interspersed within the book instead of stuck at the back like in the 2nd and 3rd books (we hardly ever got to those by the end of the year..) The 5th grade one is just as good, and we do all of the other WTM writing as well, so I am very happy with it, and haven't felt the need to add anything else.

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Well, my oldest is only the same age as yours, so I can't talk about older than 5th. But it has worked well for us. I saw dd10's writing improve a lot with the 4th grade R&S instructions. I like the way in 4th and up the composition lessons are interspersed within the book instead of stuck at the back like in the 2nd and 3rd books (we hardly ever got to those by the end of the year..) The 5th grade one is just as good, and we do all of the other WTM writing as well, so I am very happy with it, and haven't felt the need to add anything else.

 

The first three units of Beginning Wisely (3rd grade) focus on the mechanics of English: grammar, punctuation and capitalization, proofreading, and so on. At the end of Unit three, there are several lessons on writing: Meeting the Paragraph, Writing Sentences in Correct Order, The Topic of a Paragraph, and Choosing a Good Title.

 

In Unit 4, the writing lessons are Writing a Story From Pictures, Using Words to Make Pictures, Writing Smoothly, and Sharing an Experience.

 

At the end of Unit 5, there are lessons in writing friendly letters and writing poetry.

 

Preparing to Build (2nd grade) has writing beginning in Unit 1, with writing sentences; in each unit beginning with Unit 4, there are lessons in putting words in correct order, finding the subject in a paragraph, writing words in correct order; Unit 5 has *many* lessons in writing, including writing poetry.

 

Although I don't have the book itself to see what those writing lessons actually look like, it seems to me that they are not at the back of the book. :-)

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Haven't used them but I own English 5 and 6. The writing lessons look very solid. But not very interesting. I guess you could use the structure of the lessons and let them pick better topics. Writing With Skill is definitely more complex and interesting for the student. R and S looks "bare bones" in comparision.

 

That said, I've thought about having ds add in some of the writing lessons for the rest of the year while we wait for the next level of WWS to come out.

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I sometimes use the writing lessons in level 4, though we ran into a problem with one assignment. He was supposed to write instructions on how to do something. I think there were 4 suggested topics. My son didn't know how to do any of those, and when we tried to think of something he did know how to do, we couldn't think of anything that has 3-4 steps or so. I gave up and skipped the assignment.

 

I do like how they teach using keywords to take notes. That was very similar to IEW.

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Haven't used them but I own English 5 and 6. The writing lessons look very solid. But not very interesting. I guess you could use the structure of the lessons and let them pick better topics. Writing With Skill is definitely more complex and interesting for the student. R and S looks "bare bones" in comparision.

 

That said, I've thought about having ds add in some of the writing lessons for the rest of the year while we wait for the next level of WWS to come out.

 

 

Textbook writing assignments do tend not to be very interesting, lol.

 

Have you seen 7th and above? Because according to the scope and sequence, there's a boatload of writing from then on.

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