Writing programs are going to be the death of me!

[mothergooseof4]

My kids are all behind in writing. I can DO it and made wonderful grades on papers in college, but teaching it is not my forte. Therefore, I have slacked in this area.

 

My two finishing 3rd and 4th do lots of copywork, sentence dictation, and can construct a decent sentence. We dropped out of EIW4 after a few weeks, and LLATL bored us stiff. EIW was actually working fine. We just took a break and never got back to it.

 

I am not overly concerned about these two, but still don't know what direction I want to go with them for next year. I had planned to use IEW's All Things Fun and Fascinating as our main writing program, then supplement with the WWE Strong Fundamentals book, and some Killgallon Story Grammar. But, I have been looking at Classical Writing and am intrigued.

 

My ds finishing 7th is about three quarters of the way through Essentials in Writing 7. He has done okay with it, but his writing still lacks a lot. It has no luster and still requires a lot of my editing. He needs to learn more about organization and making it interesting. He can actually come up with a great story, but getting it on paper in an organized fashion doesn't happen. His non-fiction writing is very simplistic, just the basics.

 

He is the main one that I am concerned with. He really needs some work before high school. So far, I have several writing curricula on hand, but am not overly excited about any of them.

 

Essentials in Writing 8 seems to lack style, development of interesting sentences, it's very basic

 

Write Shop 1, not sure why, but this does not appeal to me. I haven't looked at it since last summer, so maybe I need to pull it out again.

 

Writing with Skill 1, looks good, but so much reading and processing of info to get to what actually needs to be done. I know ds will not be able to handle it independently, and he would like some creative writing.

 

IEW SWI, he dislikes watching the dvds. He is a "just the facts" type of kid and Mr. Pudewa loses him before he ever gets to teaching how to do something. (I sold this one)

 

Now, I have other programs that I would like to look through in order to make a decision. I would love to look at Classical Writing in person, knowing that I would have to do a quick run through some lower levels.

 

And, for some reason, I am extremely interested in The Lost Tools of Writing. Of course, I cannot find any samples anywhere, but I have watched the demo on the Circe site.

 

I wish I could purchase all of the programs that I am interested in and look through them side by side. I would still probably want bits and pieces from them all. Then we end up overwhelmed!

 

So, what would you do with this guy?

[mothergooseof4]

Argh! Just had another idea. We are taking a year off from formal history study and doing Further Up and Further In as a family. I could have him work through IEW's Narnia themed book. Oh, the possibilities. I wish there was a store where I could sit forever and look through all of the choices, but many of the things that I want to look at were not even at our convention. Even if there was a store or convention that had them ALL, I want to sit for days comparing and contrasting them.