WWE woes

[Renochka]

I have a third grader doing WWE 3. How do you tackle the child who understands the reading, can correctly answer a majority if not all of the questions but still has nothing to say when it comes time for narration. He simply "doesn't know what to write." He has a phenomenal grasp of writing mechanics: use of semi-colons, commas, parentheses, quotation marks. (Doing great with FLL 4.) He's meticulous in his word choice and often a perfectionist. Dictation is a breeze. Memory is fantastic. We have had this problem since the beginning and I can't say narration has ever gotten easier for him. He seems overwhelmed by the limit of sentences and the need to condense his thoughts and so he can't do it at all. And if I tell him to forget the limit and "just write" (we are finding if he writes his own, the thoughts flow better) or "just speak" he can't do that either. I feel like I need to reset this for him somehow. He doesn't want to drop the curriculum, I've offered. He wants to do it but just "can't." Looking for some helpful hints, something to bring on the aha moment for both of us. I feel like someone must have a secret for me to unlock the constipated narrator. 

[wendyroo]

My son worked through WWE 3 this year, and I found that he needed more explicit instruction about what role each sentence plays in a short paragraph.  WWE 3 hints at this in assignments like Day 1 of Week 2, when it asks the student to first give a topic sentence (though it doesn't call it that) and then to give two sentences that offer supporting details.

 

For a while I did the narrations orally with my son and we worked on crafting strong topic sentences: not too broad, not too narrow, just the right size to encompass the contents of the passage and be supported by details from the text.

 

Once he understood the structure he was aiming for, then we fell into this daily routine:

1 - I read him any introductory information from the teacher's guide, like vocab he might struggle with or historical background information to help him understand when he reads.

2 - He reads the selection once or twice depending on if he feels he understood it the first time through.

3 - I ask, and he answers the comprehension questions in full sentences.

4 - I give him the narration prompt and any warnings that SWB has provided, like that students will be tempted to include too many details instead of sticking to the main plot elements.

5 - He orally narrates one sentence at a time, and we discuss whether it introduces the main idea of the passage, offers supporting examples, provides necessary information, etc.  We orally edit the sentence until we think it is doing its job in the paragraph and then I write the sentence down.  We continue this until the narration is complete.

6 - We read and critique the sample narrations in the teacher's guide.  We discuss how they differ from his narration, their strengths and weaknesses, whether they leave readers with a different impression of the passage, etc.

 

This whole process only took about 15 minutes twice a week, and I could see him gradually becoming a much stronger paragraph writer.  We finished WWE 3 (and moved on to different resources rather than WWE 4), without ever transitioning him to writing his narrations.  His mechanics are very strong, and he does write (actually, type) narration sentences about his assigned literature, but writing the WWE 3 paragraph narrations was too overwhelming...especially since they often went through several "re-writes" before being committed to the page.

 

Wendy

[Miss Tick]

Do you use the "If the student has difficulty" questions? Can you help him by asking things like, "How did the section start? What happened in the middle? How did the section end?"

 

Think about the Long term goal for narrations. You are really working on note-taking skills and also, eventually, the ability to write from notes or an outline. He doesn't need those skills for another 4-6 years, so it is ok to do a lot of scaffolding and example giving and hands holding.

 

I would take a few weeks off of narrations and then try an adjusted approach to see if you have more success.

[PeterPan]

Summarizing, Grades 3 - 4 (Spotlight on Reading): Frank Schaffer Publications: 9781609964962: Amazon.com: Books  I'm using this with my ds, who has Executive Function deficits, to give him explicit instruction in this. It builds concepts very slowly, maybe even too slowly for your student. Might not be though, who knows. We've done key words, understanding details vs main points, etc. 

 

Next step up would be to use graphic organizers or other visual structure. When my dd was that age, I used a whiteboard or an app on the ipad and we would mindmap the writing. THEN she would go back and do her summary. I think if you do that, it will probably help him wrap his brain around it enough that he can get there.

 

Another way is to mindmap, let him do his telling, then let him do a revision on that to work on concision. But really, I would do some explicit instruction on structure, help him find/list the key words, help him narrow down what is important, then free him to write.

 

My dd, who struggled with this, turns out to be a fabulous writer. When we got her tested, turned out she had poor word retrieval and dreadfully low processing speed for IQ. So she was wicked smart, but she needed extra time and limited distractions to get her thoughts out. She's still that way and uses disability accommodations in college. Got her college's top scholarships, great ACT scores, but for her it's actually a disability that gets her accommodations. With them, she aced a 300 level philosophy class as a freshman. Tons of writing and all the tests were essays. But she had to have the accommodations. 

 

So that's something too, where you might consider testing at some point just to quantify it. She's really glad to have the right words for what is going on and access to the accommodations.