WWS1: Drafts or not? 12yo reluctant & not producing much

[KeepItGoing]

We are using WWS1 with my 7th-grade son, who's inclined toward math and physics. He finds WWS quite challenging, except for the outlining, which he doesn't mind. We are now finishing Week 7.

 

Because neither the student guide nor the instructor guide has been mentioning making drafts of the weekly compositions, I have not been requiring him to go back over his work to improve wording and such. I had assumed that our goal is currently on organization and selecting details, rather than on polishing. He is capable of making nicely worded sentences when he chooses to, but I have been relieved that I am not expected to push him to that level right now, considering that he seems intimidated by these assignments even without that.

 

But in the thread about evaluating everyone's WWS writing, everyone seems to be having their students do rewrites. Now I am questioning myself. Have I been making a mistake to allow his first drafts to stand, rough as they may be?

 

Thank you for any help you might be able to offer.

 

Here's a sample of his latest narration, and his last couple of compositions.

 

Betsy Bobbin, the Shaggy Man, Polychrome, and the Princess Rose found a copper man in a well. The Shaggy Man recognized the copper man as his old friend Tik-Tok. They then wound up his mechanisms for thinking, moving, and talking.

 

 

Titanic: (I gave him permission to do this particular selection of main ideas, non-ideal though it may be)

On April 14, 1912, at 11:40 p.m., someone on the Titanic saw an iceberg straight ahead. Thirty-seven seconds later, there was a collision. Passengers didn't realize it was anything serious, so they started playing with chunks of the iceberg that were on the deck.

As the ship began to flood, some officers told the passengers, "Oh, no, nothing at all, nothing at all. Just a mere nothing. We just hit an iceberg."

The captain soon realized that the ship was sinking, as ship builder Tom Andrews told him that the ship would sink in one and a half hours.

Unfortunately, the ship's lifeboats could only carry about half the passengers on the Titanic. The first lifeboats began launching at about 1:10 a.m. April 15th. At first, though, the passengers didn't want to leave the ship, thinking that it couldn't sink. So the first lifeboats were only about a quarter full. Then, the deck began to tilt, and that convinced a lot of people, and later, the lifeboats were overloaded.

You know the rest.

 

Smallpox:

 

Smallpox had always been a terrible problem. In fact, in the 18th century alone, it killed forty million people. Many doctors tried to infect people a little bit, but the people who the doctors were trying to immunize often died from the “light†infections that the doctors gave them.

One day in the late 1700s, Edward Jenner, born in 1749, noticed that milkmaids rarely came down with smallpox, and started to try to figure out why. He knew that milkmaids often got cowpox, and many local people thought that cowpox acted as an immunization to smallpox. He realized there were two types of cowpox, but only one of them worked against smallpox. Then, on May 14, 1796, Jenner tried giving James Phipps cowpox, hoping that it would act against smallpox, and it worked. He then tried it on 23 other people, and it still worked. He then published his results, but other doctors didn’t believe them. In fact, some people thought it would make them act like cows!

In 1808, the government began giving out vaccines, and deaths from smallpox decreased from at least 400,000 per year to only 600 per year.

 

[KeepItGoing]

After struggling with this for a few weeks, we found our own answer, and I'll share my thoughts in case this may help someone else. I have decided not to require significant rewrites.

 

He has not done a lot of writing before, and I've always allowed him to choose his own topics. Doing it the WWS way has caused him some significant anxiety. I believe he is learning a lot from these exercises as it is, even though they look simple to me, so I won't add the requirement to improve.

 

On page 261 of the teacher's manual, I found this statement: "Don't worry if the student begins all her sketches with 'My subject was born in...." This is only the first stage of her skill development. In future lessons, she'll learn more about how to vary sentences. Mastering the structure of compositions is a foundational step; it comes before style."

 

It has been a little bit hard on my pride to see my son producing work that doesn't look as impressive as that of his much younger cousin, but I have to remind myself: he's a different child on a different time schedule, and he still has time to develop his skills.

 

I continue to be extremely impressed with this series. I would never have guessed how difficult my son would find the narration exercises. He does a good job on them, but it doesn't come quickly or easily. Now that I realize how much thought my son has to put into this, I realize what a good idea it is to give young people this practice so early.

 

(edited for clarity and spelling)

[Melissa in Australia]

just noticed your post

 

I have 2 children doing WWS1, ds16 who has pretty bad dyslexia and dd13.

They do their WWS on the computer, that way the rough copy is their good copy. It is easy to cut and paste to make the sentence order have a better flow, add in words to improve sentence structure and fix spelling and punctuation. It works for us really well.

I have seen a huge improvement in their writing as we have worked our away through the book. we are right at the end now

 

ds16 would not be able to write anything legible if it wasn't for the computer. he is still nowhere near the writing standard of someone of a similar age.

 

 

 

for actual practice with the physical aspects of writing he does copywork straight form a novel.

 

[KeepItGoing]

In our case, the issue is not handwriting. It is the act of composition.

 

I have seen increased reluctance as the year progresses. I have been taking dictation on this writing for some time, but that was stressful for him also. Eventually he fought even dictation, and we moved to simply discussing what he would say if he were to write the piece, and the order he would say it.

 

Last week even that became too difficult for him emotionally, so for now we are skipping the composition assignments and doing the rest of the book.

 

I would not recommend this approach to other families, but he has significant anxiety-producing situations in his life right now and this is the main way that it shows up in schoolwork. When this anxiety has settled down, I plan to have him do at least some of the assignments.

 

I do suspect that part of the reason he doesn't like this is his math-and-physics personality. He prefers cut-and-dry right answers, and the wide-open nature of writing is tough on him. I hadn't realized that until last week, when we did the Week 16 lesson on personal description. He hated that week, because he was supposed to read personal descriptions and say what category the different details went under. But he vehemently disagreed with the categories he was given, and the whole thing was so infuriating to him that we ended up calling off the assignment, because it was clear that he undertood the ideas even if he didn't want to do the exercise. ("This sentence fits into two different categories, Mom. And this sentence fits into thus-and-such a category, which isn't even on the list." And so forth.)

 

I'm looking forward to a healthier time for us....

[Reefgazer]

This is exactly how I am handling my 12 year old, sciency, 6th grade daughter.  I know this thread is a bit old, but FWIW, we use Write Shop in addition to WWSI in order to clean up the grammar/spelling, introduce interesting descriptives, and vary sentence structure.  I find WWS I and Write Shop teach different techniques.

After struggling with this for a few weeks, we found our own answer, and I'll share my thoughts in case this may help someone else. I have decided not to require significant rewrites.

 

He has not done a lot of writing before, and I've always allowed him to choose his own topics. Doing it this way has caused him some significant anxiety. I believe he is learning a lot from these exercises as it is, even though they look simple to me, so I won't add the requirement to improve.

 

On page 261 of the teacher's manual, I found this statement: "Don't worry if the student begins all her sketches with 'My subject was born in...." This is only the first stage of her skill development. In future lessons, she'll learn more about how to vary sentences. Mastering the structure of compositions is a foundational step; it comes before style."

 

It has been a little bit hard on my pride to see my son producing work that doesn't look at impressive at that of his much younger cousin, but I have to remind myself: he's a different child on a different time schedule, and he still has time to develop his skills.

 

I continue to be extremely impressed with this series. I would never have guessed how difficult my son would find the narration exercises. He does a good job on them, but it doesn't come quickly or easily. Now that I realize how much thought my son has to put into this, I realize what a good idea it is to give young people this practice so early.

 

[allyall]

When I read your son's work, it reads well and makes sense overall. With my son I have to talk through what he means for each sentence to say because it is usually unclear and confusing. But my son works through the book/assignment on his own completely first usually without any complaint and then we go over it together to fix it up. Lastly I have him type it up so that I know he understands the changes we talked about.