WTM Academy Story of Ancient Times, and the required writing

[Ellyndria]

Is anyone considering this for their Logic stage student next year?  It said grades 5-8, so I preregistered for it before the syllabus was up, but now that I've looked at it, I think it might be too much writing for my 5th grader next year.

 

The syllabus says there will be two 2 or 3-level outlines per semester, three 1-2 page (300-500 word) summaries per semester, and a 2-4 page (500-1000 word) final project, along with writing answers to plenty of discussion questions online.

 

It seems like the student might need some experience in WWS or the equivalent to be able to do these things?  We haven't even really covered paragraphs yet (although I've talked about them a bit.)

 

He definitely does not like writing.  He has completed the first three levels of WWE, and is a little more than halfway through WWE4.  He is pretty good at narrating, but does not write them by himself.  He narrates them to me, and I read the first two sentences back to him once and he writes them down, according to where we are currently in WWE4.  We did a short stint in Writing Tales 1 last year, but only completed a little less than half the book, as the writing was so long for him, and I felt he didn't make enough changes to the stories to be worthwhile - he didn't really try - so I decided to go back to WWE.

 

Also, so far, his only exposure to outlines are the preprinted ones from the SOTW4 Activity book.  He has been filling them out this year, and only recently started to write from the outline.  He has also been doing the SOTW4 tests (open book), but doing the short answer (1 sentence) and essay (where he usually writes 3-4 sentences) questions takes SO LONG for him to do.  He used to give fairly lengthy narrations last year when we were doing SOTW3, but I was writing them down.

 

I wasn't even going to have him do WWS yet, as I thought I would wait until 6th and have him take Expository Writing I then.  I'm currently thinking of having him work through a couple Kilgallon books (Grammar for Middle School and Paragraphs for Middle School) next year, but I've also ordered WWS1 to take a look at it.

 

I've been thinking maybe I should just do ancients myself next year and have him work on writing his own narrations, outlines, and writing from outlines, and hopefully eventually have him write longer things.  Then maybe revisit doing WTMA for Middles Ages the following year?

 

I had almost completely talked myself out of this Story of Ancient Times, but looking at the syllabus again tonight, I wonder if I am shortchanging him.  if the summaries are just like longer narrations, he may be able to do that, and maybe by the end of the year he *would* be ready for something longer.  But then I think he probably should have more writing instruction first.

[fourisenough]

My Dd10 will be in the class. She has done WWE 1-3 & IEW history-based theme books for two years. She has also done the outlines in SOTW 4. She doesn't love to write, but I'm hoping the online class format will be motivational enough that she'll rise to the challenge. She'll be doing an AG/Beyond the Book Report class at co-op as her writing instruction. If this had not been available and very inexpensive, I would have enrolled her in Expository Writing 1 using WWS. Hope that helps.

[Susan Wise Bauer]

Ellyndria--you could definitely contact the instructor with your concerns. The instructors are very willing to work with individual situations.

 

SWB