Reluctant Writer Success Stories?

[M.K.22]

My very bright 9 yr old struggles with every step of the writing process. I feel like I have to pull narrations out of him. Copy work is hit or miss, but he has worked with an occupational therapist on fine motor skills so there has been some improvement there. Some of his spontaneous creative story telling is just brilliant, but he cannot produce anything on demand (at least not without whining and occasional tears of frustration)

. I was wondering if someone has a high school student who had similar struggles but is doing fine now. I would love to hear what worked for you and your student!

[almondbutterandjelly]

Age.  Quite honestly.  Second half of seventh grade, a switch flipped.  

[8filltheheart]

9 is still very, very young in terms of student life. There is zero need for despair at 9!!!

fwiw, I have had severe dyslexics who were not reading and/or barely writing at 9 go on to college and graduate with honors. 🙂

[HomeAgain]

1 hour ago, perkybunch said:

Age.  Quite honestly.  Second half of seventh grade, a switch flipped.  

This.  Writing was the hardest thing for my oldest and even with me using programs behind grade level nothing clicked.  We took some time in 6th/7th to do Moving Beyond The Page lit units instead of a steady program, which definitely helped, but he did WWS in late 7th or 8th and took off.  It was like a switch.  By high school his writing was very competent even if he still struggled with spelling (yay for doing all essays on the computer!) and he pulled A's in all his English classes, even the college ones.

[Mom0012]

My ds struggled horribly with writing. I honestly didn’t think he’d ever be able to write on a college level not all that many years ago. But, happily, I was very wrong. He just finished his first year of college and was on the dean’s list both semesters. He actually did better and struggled less with his papers than many of his peers.

We used IEW for quite a few years in elementary and into middle school. At one point, we switched, but we should have just stayed with it, IMO. He took a class at the local coop in 11th and 12th grade and the teacher had them read a book one week and then write a 3-5 page paper on it the next. I thought that was going to be really difficult for him and it was at first. But he worked through it and felt he benefitted so much from the class, he chose to continue with that teacher in 12th grade. It was the right instruction for him at the right time. As others have said, maturity alone made a huge difference for him.

We also did tons of reading together in elementary and middle school and he listened to many, many audiobooks over the years. I think this has helped him a lot as well.

[freesia]

My oldest would be on the floor crying at the suggestion of writing when he was 9(and I was in no way pressuring him. I was the elementary school teacher who “made” all the kids love writing. It was so humbling!)

We started IEW in fifth and there was a complete turn around.  By seventh he wanted to be the scribe at Boy Scouts because it was the easy job. In 11th grade he got a 5 on his AP English exam,  he thrived this year in his honors humanity course which was writing intensive and he told me after two weeks at home that he missed writing papers.

Maturity makes a big difference. Just keep chipping away. 

[freesia]

Oh and I agree with the pp above. I really think that my oldest kids’ writing is hugely effected by tons of read alouds and poetry memorization. They have heard good writing and memorized it.  It had made a difference.

Edited June 2, 2019 by freesia

[....]

22 hours ago, M.K.22 said:

. I was wondering if someone has a high school student who had similar struggles but is doing fine now. I would love to hear what worked for you and your student!

 

My son (currently 16) could not read until age 9.  This is actually why I pulled him and his sister out of public school.  He didn't even know his letter sounds.  He also couldn't write....at....all....  He cried when he wrote.  One time (he was about 6), I asked him to copy a sentence.  He threw the pencil down, screamed, jumped up out of the chair, ran into the wall, took off running down the hallway and into his bedroom, screaming.

I just kept working with him consistently.  He would read McGuffey Readers to me...he went through all the levels of Writing with Ease and the first two Writing with Skill books.  We did a lot of narrations.  Entire notebooks full of them.  We did all levels of Wordsmith.  

By 8th grade, he used an AP English text for English that year.  He read through SL 300 last year.  He's written several research papers and he is probably my BEST writer - out of all my kids.  He was taking a class a couple of years ago and the teacher was using my son's writing as an example for the class.  LOL.  (We all thought that was hilarious). Like my oldest, he also scores very high on SAT English practice tests.  

I've been telling him he would do really well as an English major, but he wants to go into medicine.

[RootAnn]

7 hours ago, Evanthe said:

He was taking a class a couple of years ago and the teacher was using my son's writing as an example for the class.  LOL.  (We all thought that was hilarious).

I say that my oldest is allergic to the pencil. She would take forever to write something physically and also complain she didn't know what to write. Similar to Evanthe's story, above, she had a writing teacher (her junior year of high school) ask to use her essay(s). All of us, including her, thought that was funny.

She's going to college & I'm confident she'll write her papers (in more than one language) just fine.

Incremental, small writing assignments twice per week, small revisions, hand-holding. That's what worked. But, it wasn't me that pulled it off; it was an outsourced teacher her sophomore year of high school. She wasn't ready much before then.

[MerryAtHope]

9 is so young! I know it's scary to us moms when our kids struggle with something, but at 9 they are still really baby writers. I'd back off of writing requirements and shore up spelling--in fact, that's one of the things that really helped here--I started All About Spelling when my kids were 9 and 11. It has a gradual progression of writing tasks that really helps reluctant writers. They start just working on easy words and writing very short phrases. Then they move up to dictation sentences, gradually more each level, and in level 3 they start writing some sentences independently using a given set of words. I found that after level 3, writing started becoming easier for my kids. By then they had about 1000 common words mastered and didn't have to think about how to write down every single word, and the dictation and Writing Station exercises helped to scaffold them towards being able to do more outside writing.

The writing program that helped the most here was Essentials in Writing by Matthew Stephens. Each of my kids used it for 4 years. It teaches the steps to writing very incrementally and really breaks things down into doable parts. It was the first program that worked enough for us to use for multiple years (oldest used it for 9th-12th, and youngest used it for 8th-11th.) Writing went from nearly impossible to doable during this time for my oldest.

My oldest needed a ton of help with writing--we did lots of oral writing throughout elementary and junior high, and he didn't really write an essay until 9th grade. We worked hard on writing all through high school, but it wasn't until the first year in college that writing went from "doable" to "I don't mind that so much any more," and then he started getting A's and B's on papers. 

So--it may be a journey--even a very difficult one at times--but you and he can get there! A couple of reviews on my blog that tell more about both of these programs if you are interested:

• All About Spelling Review
• Essentials in Writing Review

Hang in there!

[M.K.22]

Thank you all so much for your inspiring stories! I know 9 is still young for writing, but it is just so hard to see the big picture when you are in the middle of a temper tantrum or another day of whining and complaining or just outright refusal!  I also really have to resist the urge to compare his writing to the work that his siblings did at the same age - or the work that I did.  After all, the whole point of homeschooling is that it allows you to customize everything, right?  I feel so much better knowing that you and your kids faced similar days but patiently persisted and succeeded.  Thanks for the curriculum suggestions, too. 

[lewelma]

I wrote this book of a post on the learning challenges board a couple of months ago. My younger son has dysgraphia so has always found writing to be crazy hard. This description of our journey covers all aspects of writing, not just the composition.  I am in no way saying your child has dysgraphia, as I agree with the previous posters that 9 is very young, but you asked for success stories.  🙂  I have also copied my follow-up post, answering the question of how we kept our motivation up while remediating the dysgraphia for 4 years. Clearly, I had a lot of time that day to write! 

X-Post:

I did not know that younger ds had dysgraphia until about the age of 11. Before that I think I was just scaffolding so much that I simply couldn't see it. I finally had him tested at age 12. His dysgraphia falls into 5 categories:

1) Spelling: When ds was first learning to spell in primary school, I didn't realize he had dysgraphia. Because I had already used SWR with my older, I used it with my younger to made sure that his phonological skills were excellent, that he knew every single letter combination, that he knew every single rule for adding endings.  All of this was like the back of his hand. SWR is a powerful program.  But younger ds could still not spell.  What was lacking was automation. So after 3 years of SWR, we tried 7 other spelling programs!  Clearly, my head was end the sand, as I never even considered getting him tested. At the age of 12, he was still sounding every single word out. The problem was automation. I think 'cat' and write 'cat' without thinking, this was not true for him for any word except 'the.'  And while sounding out every single word, he would completely loose what he was trying to say in his writing.  He would also spell the same word three different ways in the same paragraph, all of which followed the rules he had learned so were valid combinations. And he still struggled with recognizing that words he was using in speech were a base word with an ending. So "hiding" was just one thing, not the word 'hide' with the ending 'ing' that he would know the rules for.  So if you asked him to add an ending to a word, he could, but if you spoke a word that already had an ending, he would not know how to spell it because he could not see that there was a base word inside it.

2) Punctuation: In addition, at the age of 12, he still had no sense of what a sentence was so was completely unable to add periods let alone commas.  We had done grammar with MCT and another program whose name I forget, but he still could not identify a subject or even a verb unless it was an exercise in a textbook.  And his language was so complex that it was not easy to show him in his own writing, but practicing punctuating simpler writing never translated into his own because his structure was way more advanced.  

3) Physical handwriting: Even today at age 15, he can write numbers, but cannot write words. Basically, his brain is not automating the creation of letters.  So an 'o' is an a-stop as he calls it.  A's are automated, so to make an 'o' he has to make an a, and then remember to stop the motion to make an 'o'. But interestingly, his brain is fine to make a zero, it is not an a-stop, even though it is the same exact shape. Most of his letters are a combination of 2 strokes that he must recall.  Once again, nothing is automated.  This means that to physically write a word, not only must he sound it out, he also must recall how to form each letter. Currently at the age of 15.5 he can write very legible handwriting at a top speed of 9 words per minute.

4) Organizing ideas: He has always had beautiful adult-level creative writing, but his report and argumentation writing was impossibly difficult for him.  We used IEW for a while, hoping that it would help him with the basics of structure, but he just couldn't implement any system. He couldn't seem to get his thoughts into a set structure. He couldn't remember that he needed an intro sentence and then supporting points and then a conclusion.  It wasn't that sentences were jumbled or unclear -- as I said, he has adult-level style with participle phrases, clauses, noun absolutes, advanced vocabulary etc.  And if he was on a 'roll', he could produce amazing non-fiction writing.  But if ever he was uncertain what to write, he had nothing to fall back on.  He could not get anything down.  The web of ideas could not be structured into linear form through intellectual effort or outlining.  Either he had intuition and flow, or he could write absolutely nothing.  There was nothing in the middle.

5) coding mental math into written form: explained in previous post.   

My solutions:

1) At the age of 11, we decided to do a big push with handwritten work for a full year.  The goal was to increase speed. I dictated to him sentences that he had written in previous work.  We set timers, we charted progress, we celebrated every small success.....  This was an absolute waste of time.  He never picked up speed, there was no way to rush him, his spelling did not improve, and all it did was create stress.  At the age of 12, we decided to abandon handwriting with the exception of math, and I only wished I had done it sooner. During that year, he had concurrently learned to touch type, but because he could not spell any of the words, he could not go faster than 10 words per minute.  People would tell me that spell check would be his friend, but he still had to get the general idea of spelling 'helicopter' for spell check to recognize it.  He still had to sound out every. single. word.  Words like cat, with, boy... let alone all the big words. He could type 30 words a minute if he was copying, but only 10 if he was having to spell the words.

2) At the age of 12, we abandoned all spelling programs (we had tried about 8 by that time) and switched to typing dictation.  I had considered Speech to Text at that point, but my ds and I decided together that we were not ready to go that way as a permanent solution.  The goal of typing dictation (as we called it) was to automate the basic words.  This dictation was not SWB's dictation where the kid is supposed to hold the sentence in her head; nor was is studied dictation like Spelling Wisdom (which we also tried). The goal of our dictation was automation of spelling.  We started to 'Cat in the Hat' because he still could not spell the top 100 words. I would dictate a phrase of like 3-5 words, (I kept to the language groupings to help him begin to hear them), and as he typed I would correct word for word.  During this time, I taught him 'think-to-spell' where you purposely mispronounce a word so that the spelling becomes regular (he knew all the rules); we created sounds for all schwas in words; I would help with spelling by simply breaking the words into syllables; I would remind him of basic ending rules, etc.  Not a lecture, just as we went with a few words as possible so I didn't break the flow.  We worked like this for 30 minutes per day 5 days a week, 45 weeks a year, for 3 years. He loved it.  Go figure. Basically, I came to believe that he just needed to put spelling in context of writing, and that he needed immediate feedback when the word was spelling wrong, and that he just needed to do this for many many sentences.  Over the years, we slowly moved up the book level to Frog and Toad, then older readers, then Narnia, then other fantasy novels he liked.  By the second year, I started punctuation study.  I would tell him after a clause "add a comma because its an introductory clause."  I would use official grammar words, and not make a lecture, just something quick. But over and over and over. What had been lacking in spelling was automation, and what had been lacking in punctuation was both real world application and drill drill drill. This process worked!  It worked beyond all my expectations.  And best of all, he loved it.  

During these years of typing dictation, we also trialed every possible combination to help him organize his ideas (#4 above).  We tried a dictaphone, mind-mapping, list making, speech-to-text. We tried me scribing; we tried me scribing only every other paragraph; we tried him verbally saying what he wanted to say 3 times before writing; we tried funny speed games "why is this item the 'best'"; we tried easy topics; we tried hard topics; we tried research;  we tried studying other writing;  we tried outlining other writing; we tried Ben Franklin's approach of rewrites. We we tried Every. Single. Thing. I could think of.  And I just felt like we got nowhere.  It was very discouraging for me, although I was very encouraging to him and he never knew that I thought we were spinning our wheels. We were making progress, but it was very very slow. 

3) At the age of 15, we quit the typing dictation because I felt that we had made very good progress. He was typing now at about 25 words a minute, he was spelling 80% of words correctly even in difficult books, and could mostly punctuate complex sentences. This was huge given where we started from!! And best of all, ds was feeling good about himself and the progress he had made.  Thus, we moved full focus into writing his own content. We started this new focus 6 months ago. Because he is interested in being a geographer and studying complex issues, he wants to be able to research and write up creative solutions to complex problems.  He has a goal, and this has been very motivating. We decided to go after deep complex topics with high interest and work with engaging questions which required research and processing and organizing.  This seems like a backwards approach, going for difficult writing projects when we had had little success with organizing ideas, but the high interest was the key to the motivation.  I figured we would get further with lots of scaffolding for hard projects, than focusing on independence for easy projects. I will admit, however, that I was nervous about taking this approach, because I knew it would be difficult to tell how much of the work was his work vs mine.

Now 6 months later, he has written 3 research papers: 1) The causes and consequences of the 2004 Tsunami in Ache Indonesia from a cultural and environmental point of view. 2) An analysis of why the population demographic transitions of Maori vs Europeans in NZ were so different over the past 180 years. 3) the cultural and environmental causes and consequences of the 55-year Wataki Dam Scheme in the South Island. It is hard for me to overstate the success we have had with these 3 projects.  Massive massive success.  It is as if the three years from 12-15 where we separated out all the skills and worked on them individually, have all come together in a cohesive whole. All those years of working on organizing his ideas that felt like a waste of time, were not.  It was seeping in, just not showing up because he could not yet write it all down.  I am still scaffolding, and I still have to sit next to him sometimes when he writes, and I have scribed for him a few paragraphs in these reports when he is just too tired but wants to keep the momentum up. However, the scaffolding required for the last paper has been way less than the first paper.  And with 2.5 years to go until graduation, I feel that we are finally on track.  I will still be remediating and accomodating, but now we are doing this *at level* rather than years behind. 

4) The future: we will continue with these large-scale, high-interest projects.  I will continue to be highly involved with the research, outlining, writing, and editing -- strongly scaffolding where needed, but slowly ever so slowly backing off and encouraging independence.  At this point, we are going to start 2 new ventures into the world of dysgraphia: 1) trying to write up chemistry and physics explanations which he will need to do for his national exams.  Scientific explanations are a different type of writing, with different language that he has to learn, but I think he is ready. 2) We are going to actually try to get him to physically write again.  He has been writing his math all this time, so his hand is reasonably strong.  We are going to start by drilling letters (we did this the other day with lots of giggles given he is 15), and we are going to see if he can write a sentence each day, and see where this leads us.  No pressure, but he wants to try.

Now, I know I have written a book here.  I have done it for two reasons.  1) once I got going I really wanted to document our path as I have never written it all out before. 2) I am hoping to give you a realistic vision of what remediating dysgraphia looks like over the long haul. There is no way around it, dysgraphia is a bitch and impacts all aspects of a child's education. Remediating it is long hard work for both teacher and student, but it can be done in a way that is positive and good for a child's self-esteem.  I have never regretted the time and effort I have put into this project.  And I had a friend just yesterday say to me that it is amazing that ds is so proud of himself, that he doesn't feel stupid, and that I never discuss him in a negative way.  DS does not mind me talking about his dysgraphia because he feels it is a part of who he is, and overcoming its is a testament to his hard persistent work over many many years. I also want you to know that you will likely make many wrong turns, and that you will be wandering in the dark, wondering if your approach is the most optimal.  This is just the nature of the beast. As I tried to show, there were things that I did that I shouldn't have done, and there were things that at the time seemed to make no difference, but then later were shown to be incredibly helpful. 

Good luck to you and your dd. Slow and steady wins the race. 

Ruth in NZ

•  

Edited June 6, 2019 by lewelma

[lewelma]

you and your son have put in tremendous effort to achieve these targets in a positive way. Whenever I make any such effort to remediate my son's (9 year old) skills, I face huge protests from him. He would gladly work on it for the first few days or weeks. Gradually he throws tantrums and arguments. He finishes the task with a lot of complaints or bad behaviour that I eventually give up. As you mentioned, it is hard work for both teacher and student. Have you faced any such troubles with your DS while continuing with a task for over several years? How do you maintain your student's motivation and attention for such long periods of time. Most importantly, how do you not lose your patience and up your motivation levels? Can you please share some of your strategies?

 

X-Post #2: 

Yes, I have definitely struggled with motivation and with being very discouraged, and yes, I so has my ds. But I think in the end we feel like we are in this together, and we remind each other that bad attitude is not ok. He reminds me as much as I remind him. 

The most important thing I think I did was to let his strengths run.  This approach convinced him that he had skills and talent. So all the stuff I talked about in my previous post was only a small part of his day.  We did high-end math orally; he read difficult science books every day; he learned to play the violin; I scribed for him his amazing stories; and his dad read and discussed complex books on numerous topics.  Most days he felt like a smart, accomplished kid who had the world in front of him.  

For the remediation part, I did everything I could to make him feel empowered. I found techniques to try, but I encouraged him to decide what was working and what was not. We focused on metacognition - how does he learn, how can he use his skills to shore up his weaknesses, how long should he work, when can he identify that he is becoming less effective, how can he use the Charlotte Mason habit of "The Way of the Will" - if you don't like a thought, then change it. He was empowered. Everyday. And on days that he could just not do something, we just didn't do it. But we always made a plan to do it later.  When he mentioned his older brother and wondered why he had things so good, we would discuss the idea that you cannot be some hybrid person - the best of you and the best of him.  You are either ALL your brother or you are yourself.  Do you really want all the negatives that your brother has in order to get the positives? The answer was always no. So we focused on him being him.  We celebrated what he offered the world that others can't.  He has so much charisma that I made sure that he was in lots of activities with lots of positive interactions every day, just check out my siggy.  And these activities were not in academics, so he was focusing on *life* not academics, focusing on what he was good at.  Basically, I've made sure that his life is 90% positive and uplifting, and 10% remediation and long, difficult, sometimes discouraging work.

I also followed his lead on what he needed, and in the end he needed *me*. For a long time, he could not do *anything* on his own. I think there just was a fear of failure, but also simply the inability to write. So for all remediation work, we did it together.  I never assigned him something to do on his own that would be hard, because he just wouldn't do it, or couldn't do it. He could write his math, but I had to sit with him. He could read his books, but I had to sit with him.  I had to do the dictation, I had to scribe, I had to help him outline. I had to hold his hand all the time.  I read posts from people saying 'what can your 9 year do independently?'  And I laugh, because only at 13 could my ds play the violin and read his science independently, every single other thing he needed me for.  Luckily for me, I only had two children.  So I worked 4 hours with my younger before doing 3 hours with my older, then tutoring for 2 hours. If I had had many kids, I'm not sure how this would have played out. People talk about helicopter parenting, and doing too much for a child so they don't become independent. But I have decided those people can just stick their comments where the sun don't shine, because they don't know me and they don't know my kid. 

As for me, I very much have felt that every day I have to put on my big-girl panties and get the job done.  I have found the last 4 years very difficult and draining. But when I signed up to homeschool, I signed up to work. I despised tying-dictation as much as he loved it. And every morning, I would get my cup of tea and my chocolate, and find it in myself to tolerate 30 minutes of correcting word for word his spelling. I just did it because I had to, and I put a smile on my face and joy in my voice no matter what I was feeling inside.  And luckily for me I read posts early on from some of the old timers on this board who discussed how kids pick up speed in high school, and how a 13 year old is a very different learner from a 17 year old, which helped me trust that he would pick up speed as he matured. I focused on keeping track of the very small improvements that I saw over the months.  It is easy to lose track of incremental change when you have a project that you have broken down into 1000 pieces for 1000 days. Can you actually see 1/1000th of an improvement each day?  Well, I tried to. And whatever I saw that was positive step forward each day, I would tell my ds to let him see his improvement, to help him believe in himself and in the work we were doing. I kept a journal with ideas and success stories, reviewed every term what we had accomplished, and then made a plan for the next term to build on our successes. Once a year, I would make a huge list of everything we had done, so although the daily improvements were small and often hard to see, the annual improvements were huge.  When I got blue, I would remember how far we had come the previous year, and trust that my incremental daily program would produce similar results in the current year. Some days, I kept myself going by thinking about the boy my son would have been had he attended school. The boy who would have failed everything, who would think he was stupid, who likely would have dropped out by now. This is the alternative reality that existed for my son, and I remind myself that it is through my hard work and dedication that it is a fate he avoided. 

Ruth in NZ

Edited June 6, 2019 by lewelma

[Kareni]

Kudos to you and your son, Ruth, for all your hard work and for your accomplishments. Wishing you both well.

Regards,

Kareni

[mathnerd]

Ruth, you are an inspiration in many ways to many people (including myself). Best wishes to your son.