What writing curricula would be redundant to use together?

[Amy M]

I feel really insecure about teaching writing. This is perhaps evidenced by how many writing curricula I have! :huh:

 

Here's what I have:

 

1. CAP W&R 1-2
2. CW Aesop A&B
3. CW Homer A&B
4. CW Poetry for Beginners A
5. WWE 1-3, workbooks and IG
6. WWS1
7. Writing Strands levels 2-5 (level 3)
8. Igniting Your Writing 1-2
9. Wordsmith Apprentice
10. and we do the writing sections of R&S grammar
11. Evan Moore booklets How to Write a Story, and How to Write Nonfiction grades 3-6
12. In the Hands of a Child Paragraph Island Rescue
13. Write From History Early Modern History Level 1 pdf
14. Sentence Composing from Kilgallon (think it's elementary)
15. IEW TWSS DVD course
16. Most Wonderful Writing Lessons Ever (or something like that)

The ones in green are purchased and still coming to me; the ones in purple I have used a lot. The ones in orange-red I have dabbled in or used up to 30%, but not enough to really appreciate.

 

I also have several books I bought for self-education; here are some of them:

• Lively Art of Writing (I have a book, is there a workbook to this too?)
• Composition in the Classical Tradition
• Strunk and White Elements of Style
• On Writing Well
• Why Johnny Can't Write
• Bird by Bird
• IEW TWSS could be included here as well

So this is a little ridiculous, is it not? And I'm contemplating getting an IEW themed book as well! Someone stop me, please. I've read lewelma's long thread a few times. I'm trying to think of something to help me figure out what to do! So I wondered: Do any of these curricula overlap? Like CAP narrative 1--does it overlap with CW Homer or WWS1? What would be a good sequence for some of these? Which ones would work well together, in a proper order, to help teach important skills? Which are inferior and I should just forget that I have them? :) Obviously some are on a different maturity level, so maybe I shouldn't beat myself up too much about having so many. How do you use the IEW course? Do you incorporate it into other writing curricula you're using? Or do you have to buy a themed course to use it well? Confused. :huh:

 

ETA: list one more curriculum I forgot about, haha!

Edited June 25, 2016 by Amy Meyers

[EKS]

So I'm looking at the ages of your children, and here is what I would do.  

 

5yo:  Five minutes of handwriting practice each day.  

 

7yo:  Write one sentence per day about something he has learned.  The prompt may be something like "Tell me about the pyramids."  If he has trouble with such a general prompt, make it more specific.

 

9yo:  Write one paragraph per day about something he has learned.  The prompt could be the same as the prompt for the 7yo or different (in my family, if I were to use the same prompt for both kids, the older one would have felt disgruntled about having to write more than the younger one, so different would have been the way I would have gone here, but YMMV).

 

That's it.  Seriously.  Your kids are young.  My experience is that writing programs make things more complicated than they need to be.  I have never found a program that I like, and believe me, I've looked!

 

If you want another book for you for your collection, I highly recommend Engaging Ideas by John Bean.  It is *the best* book on teaching (and learning) academic writing that I have come across in 13 years of homeschooling.  The main point of the book is that good thinking and good writing go hand in hand in an iterative process that develops over many revisions.  The book is meant for college instructors, but the ideas it contains can be used by anyone.  It will also help you to see what you're aiming for.

Edited June 25, 2016 by EKS

[Amy M]

So I'm looking at the ages of your children, and here is what I would do.  

 

5yo:  Five minutes of handwriting practice each day.  

 

Okay, done. Doing it. (Also including 4yo, but don't stress if he can't.)

 

7yo:  Write one sentence per day about something he has learned.  The prompt may be something like "Tell me about the pyramids."  If he has trouble with such a general prompt, make it more specific.

 

Interesting. That's what I was doing with my older when he was in 2nd. I was basically doing my homemade WWE2 sorta following the IG. But then I wasn't sure if he was getting it right, so I went back to the workbook for this little guy. Maybe I should have just trusted the process I was doing.

 

9yo:  Write one paragraph per day about something he has learned.  The prompt could be the same as the prompt for the 7yo or different (in my family, if I were to use the same prompt for both kids, the older one would have felt disgruntled about having to write more than the younger one, so different would have been the way I would have gone here, but YMMV).

 

Really interesting....comments below.

 

That's it.  Seriously.  Your kids are young.  My experience is that writing programs make things more complicated than they need to be.  I have never found a program that I like, and believe me, I've looked!

 

Kai, I'd be REALLY interested to see the list of programs you've tried! Can you please tell us?? :)

 

If you want another book for you for your collection, I highly recommend Engaging Ideas by John Bean.  It is *the best* book on teaching (and learning) academic writing that I have come across in 13 years of homeschooling.  The main point of the book is that good thinking and good writing go hand in hand in an iterative process that develops over many revisions.  The book is meant for college instructors, but the ideas it contains can be used by anyone.  It will also help you to see what you're aiming for.

 

Nooooooooo! Not anooooooootherrrrrrr onnnnnnnnnnnneeeee...  haha :drool:  I haven't even read all the books I have! Well, I'll just hop over to Amazon...oops, I'm already on there...I'll tell my husband we can't afford those new curtains because I'm going to purchase ONE MORE WRITING BOOK...  lol!

 

Once a homeschooling lady farther along on the journey than me, with 8 kids, also trying to classically educate, said that she didn't do much with writing in elementary. She even surprised me by saying that when she used IEW SWI-B in 7th grade, she didn't reuse it with her others. Why, I asked. She replied something along the lines of, she didn't think writing courses did much good until the child had better logic to know what to write and how to say it logically. My oldest will start 5th grade in Jan 2017.

 

So would you agree with that? Am I kind of spinning my wheels trying to do writing curriculum in elementary when they'd get it much better around the 7th-8th grade levels (kinda like delayed math, only, it makes much more sense to me with writing)? I'm not talking about quitting copywork, narration, or even dictation, but actual writing instruction like paragraphs, etc.

 

ETA: question to see the list of curricula Kai has tried. :)

 

Edited June 25, 2016 by Amy Meyers

[EKS]

Let's see, writing programs I've tried (we never finished any of them):

 

Wordsmith Apprentice

 

IEW (The keyword outline approach was a hit here with the older kid but the rest of it was a bust)

 

K12 (3rd grade)

 

Hake

 

MCT (We loved reading through Sentence Island and Paragraph Town, but the assignments were not to our liking.  I actually rewrote Essay Voyage to make it more to my liking and used it with my younger son and he did learn to write a five paragraph essay with it.)

 

WWE 2 (This started out ok, but about a third of the way through my son said he wanted to do "real" writing.  That's when we moved to the paragraph writing that I suggested in my PP.)

 

WWS 1 (I didn't learn my lesson from WWE 2)

 

WWS 2 (I didn't learn my lesson from WWS 1)

 

Write Source

 

The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing (This was actually pretty good, but we moved away from it to a more free form approach halfway through the year.)

 

These are all of the ones I can remember.  There are probably more.

 

 

Edited June 25, 2016 by EKS

[EKS]

So would you agree with that? 

 

I'm not sure that I agree that you should wait until late middle school (early high school?) to start writing instruction.  I have just found that the writing *programs* I've used have been both too confining--with lots of restrictive instructions for how one must do things as well as topics to write about--*and* not instructive enough--meaning that there frequently seemed to be a large disconnect between the instruction given and my kids' ability to produce what was required based on that instruction.

 

A few months ago I wrote a paper for a graduate course on the problem of teaching writing in a homeschool setting.  Here is what I had to say about writing programs:

 

Teaching the academic writing skills needed for college is a tricky business, as this type of writing is a process that combines several high level skills--comprehension of complex texts, evaluation of the ideas contained in them, and synthesis of those ideas into a coherent and meaningful document--via a process that is not at all linear.  Indeed, Elbow (1973) notes that accepted wisdom dictates that "writing is a two-step process.  First you figure out your meaning, then you put it into language...Central to this model is the idea of keeping control, keeping things in hand.  Don't let things wander into a mess" (p. 14).  My experience has been that most writing programs use this accepted wisdom as a starting point, with exercises that go from brainstorming to outline to finished product in a neat and orderly progression.  Some of the more thoughtful programs will mention that writing is an iterative process, usually illustrated with a diagram with arrows pointing from later stages in a linear process back to earlier ones, but they never seem to mention the mess itself, probably because each mess is unique, and, thus, not amenable to the generalizations imposed by a writing program. 

 

I don't know if that answers your question, but there it is.

[Farrar]

Here's my take... it's okay to combine writing programs, but not to overload a child. And if you're going to combine things, you want to make sure you're not just doing the same skills with a mildly different take over and over. You want the combination to actually hit on different skills or different experiences of writing. And if a child needs more practice with a skill, you do another program in succession to see if the different take is better. If that makes sense...

 

In general, while I'd do different things, I agree with EKS - keep it to a simple routine. Or pick one program like WWE or CAP and just do that. And then maybe, for fun, every once in awhile, take a break from the program and do something that's more fun like Igniting Your Writing or something for a month or so. Or do a fun program on Fridays and the main program the rest of the week or something along those lines.

 

I'd treat grammar as a separate subject. Obviously it's connected, as is literature. But I'd see it as a separate issue.

 

I'd sell the stuff that is core programs and not fun stuff that you're clearly not getting to, like Writing Strands and IEW and maybe even Killgallon. Or I'd box it up and put it elsewhere. Get it off your shelves so it's not sitting there taunting you or tempting you or whatever it does to make you feel like you're not on the "right path" with writing.

[Amy M]

I'm not sure that I agree that you should wait until late middle school (early high school?) to start writing instruction.  I have just found that the writing *programs* I've used have been both too confining--with lots of restrictive instructions for how one must do things as well as topics to write about--*and* not instructive enough--meaning that there frequently seemed to be a large disconnect between the instruction given and my kids' ability to produce what was required based on that instruction.

 

A few months ago I wrote a paper for a graduate course on the problem of teaching writing in a homeschool setting.  Here is what I had to say about writing programs:

 

Teaching the academic writing skills needed for college is a tricky business, as this type of writing is a process that combines several high level skills--comprehension of complex texts, evaluation of the ideas contained in them, and synthesis of those ideas into a coherent and meaningful document--via a process that is not at all linear.  Indeed, Elbow (1973) notes that accepted wisdom dictates that "writing is a two-step process.  First you figure out your meaning, then you put it into language...Central to this model is the idea of keeping control, keeping things in hand.  Don't let things wander into a mess" (p. 14).  My experience has been that most writing programs use this accepted wisdom as a starting point, with exercises that go from brainstorming to outline to finished product in a neat and orderly progression.  Some of the more thoughtful programs will mention that writing is an iterative process, usually illustrated with a diagram with arrows pointing from later stages in a linear process back to earlier ones, but they never seem to mention the mess itself, probably because each mess is unique, and, thus, not amenable to the generalizations imposed by a writing program. 

 

I don't know if that answers your question, but there it is.

 

No wonder I'm having trouble choosing a curriculum! lol  It's clearly a messy business, all around.

 

[Amy M]

Here's my take... it's okay to combine writing programs, but not to overload a child. And if you're going to combine things, you want to make sure you're not just doing the same skills with a mildly different take over and over. You want the combination to actually hit on different skills or different experiences of writing.

 

Thanks, Farrar, your comments were helpful. So my next question would be...off of my list, do you know which ones cover the same things? CW and CAP are both progym supposedly. What about WWS--would it be redundant with any of the others?

 

Oh, and I do treat grammar separately.

 

[Tiramisu]

I'm going to jump on this train.

 

I am planning on using Modern Speller and Just Write with my 10 yo. MS is for physical writing and JW is for thinking writing. But we also do HWT for cursive.

 

I'm going to hold off on grammar until January because what I like includes good writing instructions. Still I'm second-guessing myself and want to add in content writing in science. Too much, right?

[Ellie]

Once a homeschooling lady farther along on the journey than me, with 8 kids, also trying to classically educate, said that she didn't do much with writing in elementary. She even surprised me by saying that when she used IEW SWI-B in 7th grade, she didn't reuse it with her others. Why, I asked. She replied something along the lines of, she didn't think writing courses did much good until the child had better logic to know what to write and how to say it logically. My oldest will start 5th grade in Jan 2017.

 

So would you agree with that? Am I kind of spinning my wheels trying to do writing curriculum in elementary when they'd get it much better around the 7th-8th grade levels (kinda like delayed math, only, it makes much more sense to me with writing)? I'm not talking about quitting copywork, narration, or even dictation, but actual writing instruction like paragraphs, etc.

 

 

 

:iagree: :iagree: :iagree:

 

For myself, I avoid products which focus on writing paragraphs, as if everything revolves around them. Children (and adults, for that matter) can be adept at putting everything in tidy little paragraphs and still not be able to write worth beans. Learn how to write first, then learn how to organize what has been written into paragraphs. And no rules such as every paragraph has to have [insert favorite number] of paragraphs each of which must have an opening sentence, and closing sentence, and [insert favorite number] of supporting sentences. Or that there MUST be a certain number of rough drafts, or require children to check things off a list every.single.time they write something.

 

I think that's all. :D