How long should the amplifications in CAP W&R be, you think?

[luuknam]

Obviously it's going to vary per kid... just wondering what you'd aim for. In Chapter 2 my kid managed to make the story shorter, and only a tiny bit longer in a rewrite, and then in Chapter 3 he managed to make it 1.5 times as long. I'm thinking probably at least 2x the original length would be ideal, but not sure.

 

Link to this year's W&R thread (join in! - I can't be the only person doing W&R this year?):

 

http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/623497-cap-wr-2016-2017/

[Chelli]

I never really expected a specific amount for an amplification other than it needed to be longer, even if that was just by one sentence. Sometimes my daughter would really get into an assignment and other times she just wasn't feeling it. That was fine with me because i get it. Sometimes i would be required to write things in school that i wasn't jazzed about either and it was torture to hit a specific word limit.

 

That being said if my child was consistently just doing the bare minimum (barely longer than the original) then i would probably set a length requirement.

[luuknam]

That makes sense. It's too early to tell how he's going to do on length - I'd have to see at least a few more amplifications.

 

One of the issues is that he leaves details out when doing the amplification. Yesterday, after he did his amplification, I grabbed a pencil and went through the summary with him and crossed out the sentences he copied, underlined the ones he paraphrased, and added some insertion marks where he added some stuff. So he added some details in 3 spots, but left out some stuff in 2 spots. I suggested he do the same next time, but while writing (though I did that before I typed it up and did a word count, and I thought it was shorter than it turned out to be (so hard to guess with handwritten vs print). I don't need him to include every detail from the summary, but it would help with length to not leave out details. But then and again, I don't want him to feel like he has to copy the summary (with some extra details) - paraphrasing with added details is better (so long as he doesn't leave out too many details).

 

Probably just overthinking this, need to watch the next few lessons and see what happens.