Jump In writing curriculum

[happynurse]

Hello! Can anyone give me thoughts/opinions/experiences with Jump In writing curriculum?

Background: This would be for next year for my son who will be in 6th grade. We tried IEW 1A with the DVDs this year and only made it to about week 6. This kiddo has ADHD and Mr. Pudewa's long video lessons were killing him. Also, he ended up trying to rewrite the story almost verbatim to Mr. Pudewa's original piece, despite my efforts to teach him to put his own spin on it. He is very artistic and actually enjoys writing creatively, but needs training on the structure and mechanics of formal writing. I appreciate any feedback. Thank you!

[freesia]

I have used separately  it for 3 kids ( plus my friend’s kids one of the years.) It worked really well. We also did it after IEW. It has worked for both my STEM and my creative kids. 

[Lori D.]

We used the original Jump In many years back with our struggling writer, when he was 8th grade. (It now has a revised edition.)

Jump In is designed as a 2 year course (they recommend interspersing the 14 chapter/units of the student notebook with "writing plunges" (10 minute "free writing from the writing prompts in the Teacher book). However, we really disliked the free write prompts -- lame, dull, and very similar. And it would have killed any momentum or progress by having to "stall out" for 4 weeks in between units to have to do the free writes.

We dropped the free writes portion and we completed the program in 1 year, as our son was able to handle doing 1-2 exercises a day (they are usually quite short), which allowed us to then spend a week on the longer writing assignments.

Overall, we found Jump In to be a gentle, very incremental writing program. Jump In is informal in tone, written to the student, and our son was able to do much of Jump In without help. Each chapter has several "cycles" of instruction, then exercises, then shorter writing assignments that increasingly go into more depth, and then each chapter ends with a list of longer writing assignments to choose from. The first 100 pages of Jump In focuses on teaching the student how to: 

- figure out *what* to write
- how to support the topic sentence
- and how to organize his thoughts/writing/paragraphs

The second half of the book focuses on applying these techniques to the 4 different types of writing (persuasive, descriptive, narrative, expository).

Other than not really liking Jump In's writing prompts, the only other thing I didn't like is that the Student Workbook (meant to be consumable -- in other words, the student writes right in the book) is NOT spiral bound, but "perfect" bound -- which makes it extremely frustrating to get the book to stay open. My son wrote in a spiral notebook instead; you could also slice off the binding and either 3-hole punch the student workbook, or have it re-bound in a format that LAYS FLAT! Another option would be to have your student practice typing by typing up all of the exercises and assignments and printing them out.

One note: Jump In is strongly from a Christian viewpoint (put out by Apologia). Mostly this does not come into play, but some of the examples of good writing, and a few of the ideas for writing assignments do include things from a Christian viewpoint. And a few "hot button" issues such as abortion are included as the occasional example -- you may wish to preview the program first if this is a problem. See links below.

If you have used Jump In -- a past thread with more feedback on the program
Jump In sample pages -- student book, and, teacher book

BEST of luck in finding what works best for your family!  Warmest regards, Lori D.