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Talk to me about writing expectations for a 5th grader


maptime
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My oldest is entering 5th grade and I'm starting to feel a little lost when it comes to what my expectations for writing "across the curriculum" should be.  What kind of writing assignments (if any) do you give your 5th grader in addition to his/her dedicated writing program?

 DS isn't writing-adverse and is comfortable composing a paragraph from a self-written outline, but we haven't really done any formal essays or reports.  Now I'm wondering if we need to up our game.  What kind of writing assignments would you expect from a 5th grader in the content areas, and how frequently would you assign them?

This would be above and beyond his regular writing curriculum, which I think will be IEW for this year and WWS in 6th. 

Thanks in advance.  While it will be my sixth year homeschooling, this is my first logic stage kid and I suddenly feel like I have no idea what I'm doing.  I really appreciate any thoughts you may have!


 

Edited by maptime
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I don't have my kids writing across curriculum in addition to a writing program.  Typically, writing across curriculum is their writing. If you want an idea of the progression my kids make, I shared a general overview on the forums years ago (the explanation is long and required posting 2 posts).

 

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I bought a 3x week writing curriculum that is nice and gentle.  In addition to it, ds (4th grade) will be doing:
-interactive notebooking for science (1 day a week + 1 lab a week)
-history summaries (1-2/week)

He does have a few more writing projects - he'll research and write a visual presentation + speech this year, and do a few projects tied in to history, but we're still doing the bulk of writing with instruction. 

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Writing across curriculum is our writing program. I personally would not do both, unless the formal program is only scheduled for 2-3x a week. In my opinion, essays and formal reports are too much for this age (although you will get a wide variety of opinions on that). For 5th grade, my kids typically write two narrations per week. This is one paragraph; I like to see 4-5 sentences. Then they do two one-level outlines per week. That's it.

In my house, essays come later once their narrations get to 3-4 paragraphs and that's usually not until 8th grade.

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Personally, I expect a typical middle schooler to be solid on paragraph writing and just be working on polish in 5th and 6th grade. I expect they did maybe one or two multi-paragraph written narrations or reports in 4th grade at the very least (if they were writing averse or just struggle with paragraph writing in general). In 5th grade, we start focusing more on multi-paragraph composition, 2 - 3 paragraph compositions at the beginning of the year and at least one full multi paragraph report by the end of the year. In 6th grade we will still work on those same things but maybe 2 or 3 full reports before the end of the year.

My end goal in middle school is to be full working on formal academic essay composition in 7th and 8th grade so to get there from 5th grade our goals are to have paragraph composition to be automatic by the end of 6th grade, introduce and practice different types of multiparagraph compositions and at the end of 5th grade into 6th grade start working on simple essay composition. By the end of 8th grade, I would like them to be able to write an essay a month on a given topic but if they are still working on polishing their essay technique, that's fine. What I don't want, and I would personally consider to be remedial in high school, is teaching basic essay writing in 9th grade. I want them solid on basic essay writing entering  high school and just working on polish and a variety of formats (opinion, research, literary analysis, persuasive, etc) throughout high school.

I don't really use a writing program. I do use a lot of ideas from Bravewriter and borrow bits and pieces here and there from other programs when a child needs focused work on a particular concept but as the others have said, writing across the curriculum is our writing curriculum. I think trying to do writing across the curriculum and a writing program at the same time is a recipe for burn out. If you really want the hand holding of a writing program and writing across the curriculum, I would just tweak the assignments in the writing program to match what we are studying in other subjects.

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Last year my then 5th grader did IEW Fables Myths and Fairy Tales for composition instruction and a one paragraph summary every week or two about something that interested her about her history studies. I didn't require an outline for her paragraph/summary, but I did remind her that she needed a topic sentence and that the clincher sentence should repeat or reflect 2 or 3 key words from the topic sentence.

This year in 6th grade she will do IEW SWI-B followed by SICC-B, which she will continue into 7th grade and which is more difficult than Fables and also a little bit more output. But her history output will remain the same.

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57 minutes ago, sweet2ndchance said:

I think trying to do writing across the curriculum and a writing program at the same time is a recipe for burn out. If you really want the hand holding of a writing program and writing across the curriculum, I would just tweak the assignments in the writing program to match what we are studying in other subjects.

Coming back to say that I agree with this! I don't do "writing across the curriculum" because I personally need the hand holding of IEW to be an effective writing teacher. But I feel like the theme books get me kinda close to that concept when I choose one that correlates with our studies.

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5 hours ago, 8FillTheHeart said:

I don't have my kids writing across curriculum in addition to a writing program.  Typically, writing across curriculum is their writing. If you want an idea of the progression my kids make, I shared a general overview on the forums years ago (the explanation is long and required posting 2 posts).

 

 

Thank you so much for posting this!  I so appreciate seeing the learning-to-write process broken down in this way; it is the exact kind of scaffolding my brain has been craving.  I love the idea of the student creating a "chapter book" consisting of several subtopics.  What a great way to practice organization, research, and note-taking without throwing intros, conclusions, and transitions into the heap as well.   This is the exact "step" my ds is ready for, and I may press *pause* on our regularly scheduled program a few times next year so we can work on this in his other subjects.  

 

3 hours ago, hollyhock2 said:

Writing across curriculum is our writing program. I personally would not do both, unless the formal program is only scheduled for 2-3x a week. In my opinion, essays and formal reports are too much for this age (although you will get a wide variety of opinions on that). For 5th grade, my kids typically write two narrations per week. This is one paragraph; I like to see 4-5 sentences. Then they do two one-level outlines per week. That's it.

In my house, essays come later once their narrations get to 3-4 paragraphs and that's usually not until 8th grade.

 

 Thanks for this.  I've always found the concept of "written narrations" a bit nebulous (Are they summaries?  paragraphs?  streams of consciousness?) , so hearing how you break it down is helpful. 

 

2 hours ago, Momto6inIN said:

Coming back to say that I agree with this! I don't do "writing across the curriculum" because I personally need the hand holding of IEW to be an effective writing teacher. But I feel like the theme books get me kinda close to that concept when I choose one that correlates with our studies.

 

This is me!!  In my heart I really *want* to be a write-across-the-curriculum homeschooler, but I feel like I need more hand-holding as a teacher before I'll be able to pull that off in any kind of organized way.  Something I can work toward, though🙂 

Edited by maptime
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21 hours ago, hollyhock2 said:

Writing across curriculum is our writing program. I personally would not do both, unless the formal program is only scheduled for 2-3x a week. In my opinion, essays and formal reports are too much for this age (although you will get a wide variety of opinions on that). For 5th grade, my kids typically write two narrations per week. This is one paragraph; I like to see 4-5 sentences. Then they do two one-level outlines per week. That's it.

In my house, essays come later once their narrations get to 3-4 paragraphs and that's usually not until 8th grade.

^ This is how it (mostly) plays at my house as well.

And the essays (usually) come *after* you've spent time talking about the subject-- helping them think out loud before they have to write it all down. Some of mine have been able to skip this step sooner, but both my high schoolers still sometimes write their best work after we've talked it out first. 

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