How much time daily for IEW for 6th grade?

[Penny_P]

How much writing is actually involved over the course of a week? Can DS type it on the computer? My son is a reluctant writer- how much other writing will be needed outside of IEW to round him out, or will IEW pretty much cover that?

 

Thanks!

[TarynB]

I'll take a shot at answering. You didn't say which IEW product you'll be using, but my DS did SWI-B last year. He was very writing-reluctant initially too. We typically do school 4 days per week and he spent roughly 30 minutes every school day on SWI-B, and we stayed right on track with the recommended schedule and even got a bit ahead at times. On days where we watched the video instruction (usually once per week or sometimes once every two weeks, depending on the lesson), sometimes he would go closer to 45 minutes per day. I felt that spending longer than 30 - 45 minutes per day on writing would be counter-productive, for him, but he was a young 5th grader at the time, so YMMV. He typed everything except when taking notes from the videos. (Note-taking from the videos never took very long though, even by hand.)

 

As we got closer to the end of SWI, he had enough confidence and willingness to do more writing across the curriculum, so he started naturally writing more in his content subjects, but I didn't count that as "writing" class, it was part of history/science/lit class.

 

I didn't add any other writing curriculum at the same time that we did IEW. (The previous year he did WWE4.) Following IEW, we spent a few weeks on Paragraph Writing Made Easy (b/c I felt he needed more explicit instruction on how to structure a well-written paragraph) and a formal outlining workbook, just to get him geared up to start WWS this year. HTH.