Writing across the curriculum

[PeachyDoodle]

If you use a separate writing program, I'm interested to know how you handle writing in other areas of your curriculum, especially content subjects.

 

Do you do separate writing assignments for each content area, on top of your writing program? Sub out topics in your writing curriculum to coordinate with what you're studying elsewhere? Some combination?

 

I feel like we need the structure of a separate writing program, but I'm loath to neglect writing in history/science because it helps with retention. Then again, doing it all seems like overkill. How do you find balance?

 

 

 

 

[Chrysalis Academy]

I'm shooting for what SWB suggests in her high school writing lectures: work through a writing (rhetoric) program, learning the concepts and doing exercises/assignments, and then separately writing across the curriculum.  I want both!  I want the explicit instruction about how to construct compositions, but I want the to practice via content subjects, and I want the extended/deepening learning & thinking that comes from writing about a topic you've studied.  You can't write till you've really thought, and so having writing assignments in content subjects keeps us honest.

 

As far as how, I just try and juggle flexibly.  In 7th grade, she has had one outside writing project at a time - in history or literature or science. She's not doing multiple papers in multiple subjects at the same time, though that is the goal for high school.  That means you can't write about every book, or every topic, but it means you are always working on something.  The assignments from the writing program are usually shorter and less involved, and the tuck in there in between larger pieces across the curriculum.

[PeachyDoodle]

I'm shooting for what SWB suggests in her high school writing lectures: work through a writing (rhetoric) program, learning the concepts and doing exercises/assignments, and then separately writing across the curriculum.  I want both!  I want the explicit instruction about how to construct compositions, but I want the to practice via content subjects, and I want the extended/deepening learning & thinking that comes from writing about a topic you've studied.  You can't write till you've really thought, and so having writing assignments in content subjects keeps us honest.

 

As far as how, I just try and juggle flexibly.  In 7th grade, she has had one outside writing project at a time - in history or literature or science. She's not doing multiple papers in multiple subjects at the same time, though that is the goal for high school.  That means you can't write about every book, or every topic, but it means you are always working on something.  The assignments from the writing program are usually shorter and less involved, and the tuck in there in between larger pieces across the curriculum.

 

This is exactly where I am! Especially as we move into the logic stage for next year, I think I am ready to step it up a little. And I think dd is ready too.

 

Your rule of thumb about one outside writing assignment is a good one. Your oldest dd is a little older than mine (almost 10 -- planning for 5th grade right now). Would you mind sharing how you have built up to this level? One thing I'm struggling with is the way assignments in our history and science curricula are laid out. Most every lesson includes summarizing what she's read or answering a discussion question (not more than one paragraph at this level). They're short, and she can certainly handle doing all of those along with the writing program. Were you doing longer compositions in content areas at this point? Or still working up to it? We're probably going to use WWS1 next year, and it appears to assign only short pieces, at least in the beginning (don't have the book yet, so I'm going off the sample). It might not be a good idea to try to do longer compositions in content areas until after she practices in WWS. So maybe just following both the writing and content curricula with their short assignments would be best for 5th, in preparation to move to longer compositions in 6th?

 

[Chrysalis Academy]

Oh, we've definitely worked up to it!  In 5th we were using WWS and doing very little "extra" writing.  The main outside assignment Shannon did in 5th was writing book summaries.  This is just what it sounds like - taking a long book, reading some of it each day, and each ~3 chapters writing a summary.  At the end of the book, you have a stack of summaries.  Then you go through and put it together: cutting out things you don't need, adding transitions and any other info a reader would need to follow it, and writing a brief analytical section at the end (using one or two of the literary analysis questions from WTM).  Put in an intro & conclusion, and you've got a single piece of writing that exercised multiple skills.  She did that for about 4 novels on top of the WWS assignments.  That was pretty much it for writing in 5th grade.

 

In 6th, we decided to study history topically, and so there was some sort of writing assignment, mostly building off the topos we learned in WWS, for each topic.  This is where we started working on reports with multiple references, too.  We didn't continue with WWS, we did kind of a random mix of writing assignments from a program in 6th, some from W&R's Narrative 2, a few from WWS2 before we dropped it.  This was also the year where she mastered typing, which made writing longer pieces with multiple revisions much easier!

 

This year she did Lively Art of Writing for rhetoric studies, and we've focused on learning to write essays.  Across-the-curriculum writing assignments have been from the Big History Project and from Movies as Literature, two content resources we've really been enjoying.

[Chrysalis Academy]

I just wanted to add, one thing I found very useful in developing my thinking about writing across the curriculum was the book Engaging Ideas by John Bean.  It's written for uni profs, but it helped me understand what I was striving for philosophically, and to come up with good writing tasks - writing tasks for critical thinking, and write-to-learn text-based tasks.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Engaging-Ideas-Professors-Integrating-Classroom/dp/0470532904

[PeachyDoodle]

This is all extremely helpful -- thank you! (I've been reading through the links you posted on the recent WWS thread as well -- also great stuff!)

 

We are winding down some of our subjects for this year, so I was thinking now might be a good time to try a couple of whole-book summaries on our last two novels (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). I was just trying to figure out how that process might look, and yours sounds perfect.

 

I will definitely check out the book! My main goal overall is to end up with a student who knows how to THINK. I'm just not always sure how to get there!

[Carol in Cal.]

In general, we started with summaries, and then moved on to outlines, and then to short literary papers pretty much as WTM suggests, EXCEPT, I did not make DD correct anything, just compose, and addressed editing and mechanics in other ways.  Otherwise she never would have written anything long or complex and she would have avoided the use of long, hard to spell words.  ALSO, we did not move forward as fast as WTM suggested--we did summaries all the way through, especially for complex material; she learned outlining pretty quickly and we didn't stick to it for very long.  By 6th grade we would discuss books together and then I would sometimes say, think of something that you want to write about about this book, and she would come up with her own topic.  (Sometimes I would assign topics as well.)  By 8th grade, we watched Antigone and a school version Romeo and Juliet live, and then she came up with her own thesis that she related both stories to, having to do with foolish choices leading to disasterous results unnecessarily.  This was for language arts and social studies.

 

For science I focussed more on lab reports, on honing and reporting observations, and on how to draw good conclusions.  "How do you know that for sure?" was a common question all the way through.
 

[Carol in Cal.]

PS Along the way we used various resources to teach literary terms.  

Also, "Teach Like Your Hair Is On Fire" by Rafe Esquith were really helpful in developing teaching skills and doing some advanced benchmarking for that age.  I encourage people to read that before their kids are that age.  It's excellent for transitioning to the logic stage, even though RE is not really a classical teacher.