1st grade writing

[bella2005]

How much writing should a first grader be doing. We are having battles over it. Any fun suggestions or curric? Thanks!

[Five More Minutes]

I aim for a good, but short, sentence daily at first. (WWE is a good gauge for me.) As spelling starts to ramp up a bit, I add in an extra sentence or two there. By the end of Gr. 1, my best guess is that I expect a total of about 4-5 complete, well-written sentences a day (1-2 in Writing, 1-2 in Spelling, 1 in Handwriting). But of course, that depends on the child, too.

 

Writing With Ease has been a good fit for us here. It may not be fun per se, but it's slow and steady and it really works. It takes very little time each day in the Gr. 1/2 years.

[boscopup]

My expectations are similar to Lynnita's. Start with one sentence per day, then work up from there. I think at the end of first grade, my son was doing one sentence on paper, and maybe 3-4 on the white board (which is easier). We were using AAS at the time, so the white board sentences were dictation. I used WWE as both composition and handwriting, so I didn't have a separate handwriting sentence. The following year in 2nd grade, I worked him up to about 6-8 sentences daily, and now in third grade, he's capable of writing a paragraph in one sitting (still doesn't like it, but he physically can).

 

I've seen a jump in writing ability each year as he gets close to his birthday. At this point in 1st grade (when I'd just pulled him out of school), he could only write one short sentence, and his hand physically hurt when writing. I helped the hand hurting issue by giving him an appropriate table/chair height for writing (normal kitchen/dining room chairs at a table usually have the child sitting too low, so their forearm is pointing up to write. You want the child up high enough that the forearm points down slightly when writing). We still had to build up muscles, but at least the pain was gone when he was sitting at proper height to the table. I also gave him a pencil grip (though without it, he *still* does a thumb wrap - I'm just not worrying about it anymore :tongue_smilie: ).

[Tracy]

At that age, my dd could not write more than 1-2 lines total without breaking down in tears. The only writing I had her do was 5 spelling words per day plus 2 days of copywork from WWE. By the end of the year, her stamina improved greatly, and she is able to do much more now.

[Ewe Mama]

We go for quality rather than quantity, per Charlotte Mason. They do about three sentences worth of writing throughout their homeschool day. From morning until afternoon. Everything else is oral.

 

Alvin loves to write, however, and he will frequently bring me 4-6 sentence stories that he writes on his own. If I were to ask him to write that much as part of his daily work, he would melt down. Since his own passion fueled the desire to write, nothing could stop him.

 

I think extracurricular writing goes against Theodore's sense of what is right, moral, and good, so I will probably fall over in a dead faint if he ever shows up with something he has written outside of lesson time.

 

 

[kdownie]

I have a first grader, halfway through the grade, and we are very relaxed about it. She does about 1 sentence in WWE and about page of HWOT. Sometimes, our daily lesson in First Language Lessons will have 1 more sentence, but not often. I often let her dictate at least half of her math to me too, so she doesn't have to write that. She used to battle me when I expected more, and for us, relaxing has allowed her to produce much higher quality writing since I don't expect quantity. Her handwriting has improved, which surprised me.

[plmzk]

I too switched from quantity to quality. She is doing two languages for writing so she spends a good amount of time with a pensil. Sentence wise, I think she does very little, but she is learning to write the cursive letters of a different language in addition to 2 Zaner-Bloser pages, so I'm cutting her some slack. Once she learns both of the alphabets she will be writing more.

Before we jumped into learning Russian cursive, she was able to copy a 6-8 stanza poem easy.