help me know what to do after this sad WWS1 writing assignment

[rose]

We've been working with WWS 1 for a little while now. My boy is 13yo. I've done very little formal writing prior to this mainly because I've been very confused about how to teach writing. I'm not a great writer myself and in our early years of homeschooling I took more of an unschooling approach (I regret that now). DS's 13yo sister is a natural writer and probably writes better than I do and so I'm struggling as I compare the two of them to not feel discouraged about his difficulties. His spelling, as you'll see, is atrocious. He's only recently consistently used capital letters at the beginning of sentences. We have used SWR for spelling and I should probably pull it out again and he is using R&S3 for remedial grammar. He loves science and does fairly well with math. How would you approach giving feedback for this assignment? Do you have any other advise for how I could help him develop as a writer? Do you have any big picture thoughts or suggestions?

 

Week5, Day 4

Discovery of Smallpox Vaccine

 

Smallpox was verey dangerous. It killed forty million people one year. There was no good way to cure it. Lots of docters gave there patience mild caces of smallpox but unfortunatly half of the patience died.

 

In 1749 a boy named Edward Jenner was born. Jenner was inoculated when he was a child. The inoculation made Jenner pretty sick. He evetually got better. When Jenner was thirteen he began study to become a docter. He then became a surgeons apprentice for eight years. When Jenner was twenty one he entered S. T. George hospital to study surgery and anatomy. In 1773 Jenner began to practise medicine in his home town. After some time Jenner began to notice that the milkmaids did not get smallpox. Jenner than began to investigate a relationship between cowpox and smallpox. He then developed a smallpox vaccine. On May 14 1796 he tried the vaccine on the first person and it worked.

[almondbutterandjelly]

You know, except for spelling and some commas, it's not bad.  It sounds about like something my 9th grader would do.  My suggestion would be for you to go through and mark it up with proofreading marks, and have your ds make those corrections.  Eventually, he can do his own proofreading, but you'll have to work up to that.  You might also have him work through Remedia's Proofreading workbooks (ignore the grade level suggestions).  (I made my 9th grader do both of them.)

 

As far as content, I really do feel like it's fine.  Actually, it's probably better than my dd would do (also not a natural writer) because she's a big picture thinker and would not have included any details at all.  So he's doing fine, in my opinion.

[mamamoose]

Honestly, it's not that bad. His spelling could use some work, but they are all homophones and typical mistakes, IMHO. I agree, I would make the appropriate correction marks and have him make corrections. Copy work might also be beneficial, if that's not something you've done previously.

[MerryAtHope]

1. Encourage him for his efforts. He got all the basic facts in there, and they are in a logical order. He didn't shy away from using some bigger words (like inoculated). Point these things out and praise him. Good for him!

2. Give him another day to correct any punctuation and spelling errors he can find. Praise for all he can find and fix. Let him know there is a homophone error and see if he can find it. Praise him if he can. Don't make this part too much of a chore, but it's good for kids to start to edit their work.

3. Help him know how to fix any errors he didn't know how to fix on his own. If they are common words (like "very"), consider having him start a small personal dictionary of common words. Then he can use that to check his papers before he turns them in.

4. It's hard, but don't compare him to his sister. Only compare him to himself. Help him to see how he grows over the course of a year, and encourage him in that.

5. Don't expect anything that the assignment didn't explicitly ask for, or that you have not pre-taught. (For example, I wouldn't comment on it being choppy unless the assignment called for him to focus on varying his sentence length and gave him examples of how to do that, or unless you have taught that directly and made it clear that he was to try to do that--and so on). 

 

Writing is one of those things that, for most people, takes years to perfect. Don't go for perfect assignments--look for progress, and look for him to work on one aspect that was specifically taught for that assignment. 

 

Hang in there! 

Edited June 1, 2016 by MerryAtHope

[Haiku]

I don't really think there is anything wrong with what your son wrote. Some 13 year olds are very sophisticated writers. Some are not. Your son was able to get the important facts into his paragraph. That's an excellent start. I would work with him on correcting his spelling and identify one or two places where he could consolidate sentences to reduce choppiness. Other than that, just keep plugging away!

[hornblower]

I think what I'd focus on is that for most of us writing is not a thing you do once, it's a thing you do over & over again. Edits & re-writes are part of being a good writer. 

He wrote something. Success!  As Nora Roberts says, you can fix a page of bad writing, you can't fix a blank page. 

Now just work on proofreading and editing and smoothing out the edges.  You can talk about transitions, changing the sentence length etc. You can talk about how you might rephrase it... 

fwiw, my ds really responded well to IEW and to Fix it Grammar.  

Also, does your ds read a lot? Kids who read a lot start getting an ear for good literature. They will probably still need instruction on breaking down how that author did something but just having lots of good prose in their heads will help. You could for example grab any book he's reading and find a paragraph of description & it will probably demo a variety of sentence structures and variety of sentence lengths which is one thing this piece would benefit from in a re-write. 

 

[8filltheheart]

I would use it as a teaching tool. I would make several copies of it and only work on one concept at a time (probably 1/day.). I would come up with separate teaching examples that mimic his mistakes. For example, capitalization or comma rules with sample sentences to correct. (How are dates punctuated in a sentence? How are buildings or programs capitalized? Etc)

 

After working through the rules and examples, I would ask him to correct his mistakes.

 

I would recommend incorporating mechanics instruction into his school work and perhaps incorporating Editors in Chief.

 

In terms of writing, I don't think it is on par with 13 yr old expectations, but neither is it dismal. The essential backbones are there. He just needs to build on those skills. I have never used WWS, but I wonder if a program like Put That in Writing might help him strengthen his basic skills.

[redsquirrel]

Do you have the teacher's book for WWS1? In it she has the rubric for each assignment, what they have to accomplish for the assignment to be acceptable. It's there to help you with questions like this.  So, if he meets the requirement of the word count (if there is one) grammar, spelling etc then it's good enough. It's fine.  But, if there are problems with the grammar etc then he needs to fix them so you can accept it and count it as a finished assignment.

 

I have a vague recollection of that assignment (we did WWS1 this year but finished it last week) and I think that is fine. It's not quite what I would expect from a kid his age, but given where he is in the process I think he's done a good job. It's absolutely not even close to the worst I have seen.

 

The trick with WWS is just keep plugging. You can't jump around. It's some writing almost every single day and it really helps.  And yes, stick with grammar.  How is he liking R&S 3 for grammar?  I also like FLL 3 & 4 for catching an older kid up with grammar. It is scripted, so it requires you to do it with him, but it does help.

 

Like WWS it takes a slow and steady approach, doing the same thing several times and increasing what is asked of the student in incremental steps. 

[KeriJ]

Do you have the instructor's manual? According to the rubrics, he's basically on track for that assignment. We just did that one recently, and SWB didn't ask for much of anything else as far as content goes.

 

I personally think those assignments are tricky since you are writing from a list of facts without having read the original narrative yourself.

[eternalsummer]

I think a rubric would really help you.

 

It is easy to get caught up by something small (in this case spelling) and miss the larger picture, which is that almost every other category is probably a pass.

 

So if the categories for a rubric are:

spelling/capitalization/punctuation (called mechanics)

grammar

organization

content

 

He has probably satisfied grammar, organization, and content (though he could use more work in all of those areas, you are still in the beginning of the program and there will be time).

 

Spelling/mechanics is one that is really glaring, so it kind of looks worse than it is - but in actuality it is a very small part of the whole picture.

[SanDiegoMom]

We are on Week 7 and that's pretty much what my kids gave too.  Basically since SWB gives the outline and you are just choosing which points to make, it's very easy to end up copying her words exactly.  Here is a sample of what my daughter did, who is an advanced fourth grader.  After correcting for spelling:

 

In the Eighteenth century, smallpox was a great danger. It had killed around 40 million people, and half the people who caught smallpox died. Thats a lot. There was no reliable way to avoid or treat smallpox, which made things harder. Nobody knew the vaccine for smallpox…

At least until Edward Jenner. He started to practice medicine in 1773. He noticed that milkmaids weren’t getting smallpox, and that they often got cowpox. He also knew some local people believed cowpox made them immune to smallpox. So he started to investigate the relationship between the two diseases. He kept a bunch of records of cowpox outbreaks. Finally, he inoculated a young boy named James Phipps. Jenner used pus from a cowpox blister and put it into a scrape on Phipps’s arm. Phipps got a small fever from the cowpox, but he was immune to smallpox.

 

 

She started out basically rewriting the outline, but I asked her to please use a thesaurus and change some of the words. It was still difficult for her, so for the assignment that they are on this week, I asked them to do something different. I told them to read the bolded topic sentence and the supporting details they were going to include, say them over to themselves a few times to get the information down, and then rewrite the whole paragraph rather than going sentence by sentence. It helped them to get it more in their own words. They also used a thesaurus again. They have not edited it yet -we divide the assignment over multiple days.

 

One of the boardies I recall found the source material for her student to read. I think that helped a lot -- it is hard to write about a subject that you haven't personally written about just from an outline without it coming out exactly as written! But I think that's the point in these assignments -- very incremental steps that will lead to original research and writing by the end of the year.

 

If you want to look at some of the WWS assignments, there are quite a few posted from the past on the K-8 Writing Workshop board. I posted my kids' assignment from last week, though it's not as helpful since they turned it into a creative writing assignment instead. But there are a good number of others there.

 

Here was my dd's Week 7: I just read it (revising and editing is tomorrow) and it seems my advice on how to try to get it in your own words didn't help as much as I thought it would:-)

 

Johannes Kepler studied at the university of Tubingen in the 1590s. He decided to study heliocentrism, which may have happened because one of his teachers was a follower of Copernicus.

Later, he became an assistant to Tycho Brahe and worked at his side from 1600 to 1601. He assisted tracking the orbits for planets. Both men believed the all the planets’ orbits were circles. They watched Mars at different times, but they just could not figure out its orbit. The planet seemed to speed up and slow down.

Tycho Brahe died in 1601.  He told Kepler to keep trying to understand Mars’s orbit.

Soon after, in 1605, he realized the orbit could not be a circle. It was an ellipse. So he formulated “Kepler's first law of  planetary motionâ€. The law was: Planets move in elliptical orbits, and the sun is one of the focal points.

 

 

 

 

 

[kolamum]

I agree, it's not bad. When I saw the topic of this thread I really expected horrible awful no good. That's now what I see, not even a little bit. The objective of a writing curriculum is to help your child develop the skills & knowledge that are required for writing, & writing well. Some people will take to it like a fish in water & some will look more like a beached whale. There are going to be those that float somewhere in the middle & that's okay too. 

If it's any consolation to you, I have a 15 year old who can't spell worth beans. He has Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome which took 7 years to get diagnosed. Which means all those years of spelling he had were pointless for him. When he looked at the spelling word he saw one letter at a time. He works hard at it now, but we have him type everything.. either himself of using DragonSpeak. This allows for quick edits to the spelling situation & helps build his confidence that we can reflect more on the writing.

Unless my child has done really REALLY badly {rarely} I applaud the job he's done & then direct my criticism to the areas we could "touch up". I express how he could do it with an example & allow the creativity to flow from him while I type his edit into the computer. Funny thing is, my boy started this book when he was 13 & the difference in his writing between then & now {15} are pretty big. In fact I feel the urge to go compare his 2 smallpox essays. ;)

[rose]

Thank you all for your feedback. I'm really encouraged by your responses. I think that I've been comparing ds with dd far too much. She sounds more like the exceptional one. I'll keep plugging along.

[Farrar]

I just wanted to say hugs... I also have twins where one is a good, natural speller and the other is not so great. This looks so much like something he would write - not bad, but it's very hard not to get stuck on the spelling and mechanics.

[Shalott25]

Here is my feedback.  I am a tough critic. :)

 

The first sentence should always introduce what the paragraph is going to be about.  Everything needs to connect to it.  He begins with smallpox is dangerous.  So as a reader, I think the paragraph is about the danger of small pox.  However, the bulk of the paragraph is about Edward Jenner.  The paragraph should begin with a sentence introducing him and his contribution to science in the area of vaccines. 

 

The support sounds like it came out of an encyclopedia.  The sentences are all roughly related to the same topic, but there is not a lot of variety in sentence structure or any real structure to the paragraph. As a result, not all details are necessary. I work with my students to develop 2-3 sub-points or reasons that prove the topic sentence.  Then, they support each one. 

 

I.            Jenner makes an observation.  (support by elaborating on it)

II.           Jenner studies this issue further.  (support by discussing how he studied it and came up with the vaccine)

III.          Jenner helps millions of people.  (support by giving statistic on how many lives have change and medical cost have been saved)

 

Every paragraph should end with a concluding sentence that connects back to the topic sentence.  Ideally, it should draw a conclusion or pull things together.

 

Encourage free writing and brainstorming to get ideas down.  Then, focus on helping your children move those ideas into a structure. 

 

In the revising stage, teach different sentence structures.  Encourage your child to revise to incorporate 1-2 different ones.

 

I am a college instructor.  Trust me.  If your child knows good structure and form, he/she will be head and shoulders above the average student.  

[SanDiegoMom]

I agree with everything Shalott25 says for original writing- but this assignment is in particular is formulaic and very specific. It gives the outline with supporting points already written, tells the student to begin at one of a few starting points in the chronological narrative and to include only three-four main points and some but not all corresponding details. SWB implies that the wording will be very similar to the outline provided and throughout the course she slowly teaches how to make it more in the students own voice. It is very difficult to sound original when you are writing from someone else's outline.

According to the rubric (do you have the teacher's manual?) it needs to be between 150-300 words, be in chronological order, use 3 or more time words and give the background information at the beginning. Under mechanics is where it suffers more - it does say the exact words should not be used in every sentence. But according the the rubric he followed the directions of this assignment.

The program eventually does teach how to do your own research, come up with your own outline and write an original narrative for the final project. But it is a very incremental program.

Edited June 3, 2016 by SanDiegoMom in VA