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My younger boy just won the....


lewelma
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Sorry for the suspense! DS won the 2020 national teen creative-writing competition, and his essay will be published this month with the other award winning short stories, poems, and essays.  My ds has dysgraphia and was still learning how to write The Cat in the Hat at the age of 12. This is why it is a big deal and means so much to him. 

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41 minutes ago, maize said:

That is amazing!

Congratulations to him--and congratulations to his teacher😉

We studied National Geographic and New Zealand Geographic articles for an hour a day for a month.  After studying about 10, we picked the one he liked the best and focused on it. We scanned it, enlarged it, printed it, and cut up all the paragraphs.  Then we studied the purpose, tone, style of each paragraph. We used multicoloured pens for the different things we were looking for. How was it cohesive?  That was purple. What was the purpose of each bit of dialogue? That was red. How was description used from the point of rhetoric? That was green. How do you keep to a thesis when you never clearly state it? How does each paragraph build your point in a subtle way? That was blue  We worked and worked and worked to learn the form.  Then we traveled to the Mackenzie Basin and visited all sorts of out of the way places, took photos, hypothesized, observed, talked, and just had a ton of fun.  When we came home, he wrote it.

His overarching goal was to leave people with a sense of hope. That was a tricky one for an environmental piece!  He also focused on multiple perspectives because it was written for a geography magazine -- so environmentalists, farmers, tourists. What made it particularly clever was his overarching yet subtle metaphor that he wove throughout the essay. He also interwove his own personal experience in the region with the history to create a wonderfully well rounded essay.

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On 12/10/2020 at 11:38 AM, lewelma said:

We studied National Geographic and New Zealand Geographic articles for an hour a day for a month.  After studying about 10, we picked the one he liked the best and focused on it. We scanned it, enlarged it, printed it, and cut up all the paragraphs.  Then we studied the purpose, tone, style of each paragraph. We used multicoloured pens for the different things we were looking for. How was it cohesive?  That was purple. What was the purpose of each bit of dialogue? That was red. How was description used from the point of rhetoric? That was green. How do you keep to a thesis when you never clearly state it? How does each paragraph build your point in a subtle way? That was blue  We worked and worked and worked to learn the form.  Then we traveled to the Mackenzie Basin and visited all sorts of out of the way places, took photos, hypothesized, observed, talked, and just had a ton of fun.  When we came home, he wrote it.

His overarching goal was to leave people with a sense of hope. That was a tricky one for an environmental piece!  He also focused on multiple perspectives because it was written for a geography magazine -- so environmentalists, farmers, tourists. What made it particularly clever was his overarching yet subtle metaphor that he wove throughout the essay. He also interwove his own personal experience in the region with the history to create a wonderfully well rounded essay.

I’m late to this, but you REALLY need to write a book on homeschooling!!!!! Seriously, over the years, I have cut and paste so so many of your ideas so that I wouldn’t lose them or forget them!! The approach you outlined here is stunning to me!

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