Writing Woes

[Shoes+Ships+SealingWax]

Writing is bugging me this year. I don’t feel that I can assess DS’ progression in this area as well as I can in other subjects.

My big goal for the year is to get to where I can present a him with a paragraph-writing prompt & he can select a sub-topic, plan his writing, then complete a quality first draft  mostly independently within an hour or so. 

Currently the process is taking about twice that long, with lots of second-guessing & wanting to bounce ideas off of me in the planning stage. Once his writing gets going, he’s fairly independent. He does get bogged down somewhat when generating hooks & transitions, which are newer skills. I’m happy with the finished products, but the process feels slow & I worry that I’m over-scaffolding. 

What say you, Hive Mind?

[Helpdesk]

It would help to know the age of your son and what curriculum you have used in the past.  🙂

[Shoes+Ships+SealingWax]

9 minutes ago, Helpdesk said:

It would help to know the age of your son and what curriculum you have used in the past.  🙂

He’s in 4th grade. We’ve used an eclectic mix of language arts curricula including annual participation in NaNoWriMo; W&R Fable; MCT Sentence Island & Paragraph Town; IEW Fables, Myths, & Fairy Tales; & Killgallon Sentence Composing. 

I’m aware that many homeschoolers delay composition due to fine motor development. This isn’t an issue for him; he has always enjoyed writing & fills whole pages daily during NaNoWriMo each year.

He has been writing paragraph-length compositions with proper form (hook/details/clincher, proper organization, good vocabulary) for about a year & a half. 

[HomeAgain]

He sounds creative and interested in writing something he can be proud of.

What you describe is pretty normal for a 9-10yo.  It's an age where they're between two major stages: the 'learning to" stage and the application stage.  He has the characteristics of someone learning to write: he has ideas and wants to explore them before settling on something that feels right.  He's edging into application where he will be able to narrow down those ideas more quickly and discard them without needing to discuss each one.

I think you might be asking slightly too much just at this moment, or, conversely, too little.  If you want to speed up the process you can give him a subtopic yourself and a blank outline to fill in.  I have a feeling, though, that this will resolve itself in the next 2 years or so.

[Shoes+Ships+SealingWax]

6 minutes ago, HomeAgain said:

I have a feeling, though, that this will resolve itself in the next 2 years or so.

This is my mindset on a good day, & the assumption I generally operate from. As I said, I’m happy with the quality of what he produces. I also know that by this age schools are asking for far greater volume of output, however. Occasionally I wonder if I’m holding him back, or possibly even hurting his confidence, by offering too much “partnership”. 

Edited October 18, 2022 by Shoes+Ships+SealingWax

[HomeAgain]

11 minutes ago, Shoes+Ships+SealingWax said:

This is my mindset on a good day, & the assumption I generally operate from. As I said, I’m happy with the quality of what he produces. I also know that by this age schools are asking for far greater volume of output, however. Occasionally I wonder if I’m holding him back, or possibly even hurting his confidence, by offering too much “partnership”. 

Well, yes and no on the bolded.  I think there is a lot of scaffolding in elementary that produces formulaic pieces, even if they do end up writing more overall throughout the day.  They do the brainstorming together as part of the class and to introduce the independent writing.

I also know that my ds12's writing work at public school in the past 5 weeks has consisted of several story maps, 3 quizzes, and 2 independently written stories as homework and designed as a way to use the list of vocabulary words.  What is being produced is not nearly the weekly work that we did at home, which consisted of a single piece each week that was brainstormed and outlined on day 1, topic paragraph written on day 2, body and ending on 3, and edited on day 4 before being set aside and reexamined the next week on day 1 for a final polish. 

[bookbard]

I just bought The Writing Revolution, which I quite like. It gives really clear instructions to the parent/teacher on teaching the sentence, then the paragraph, and taking notes, and so on. 

[Not_a_Number]

On 10/18/2022 at 12:59 PM, Shoes+Ships+SealingWax said:

This is my mindset on a good day, & the assumption I generally operate from. As I said, I’m happy with the quality of what he produces. I also know that by this age schools are asking for far greater volume of output, however. Occasionally I wonder if I’m holding him back, or possibly even hurting his confidence, by offering too much “partnership”. 

It sounds to me and has always sounded to me like you're doing great. You're overthinking this, I think 🙂 . 

[ktgrok]

On 10/18/2022 at 3:59 PM, Shoes+Ships+SealingWax said:

This is my mindset on a good day, & the assumption I generally operate from. As I said, I’m happy with the quality of what he produces. I also know that by this age schools are asking for far greater volume of output, however. Occasionally I wonder if I’m holding him back, or possibly even hurting his confidence, by offering too much “partnership”. 

They do, but they shouldn't. It is WAY better to have him writing GOOD paragraphs (and two days, one for prewriting and one for writing seems totally reasonable to me) than having him write long assignments badly. 

He's got years and years and YEARS to write longer stuff.