Teaching Writing

Graphic organizers are very fashionable, but they didn’t do anything for my ds either—too cluttered for him. You may wish to take a look at the Institute for Excellence in Writing, which many homeschoolers use. (You can check out the forums on welltrainedminds.com.) IEW starts out the writing process very gently with the child rewriting paragraphs written by someone else through the use of what they call a key word outline. The IEW website is incredibly difficult to navigate, but check it out at www.writing-edu.com. Click on “newsletters” on the left and read the article “Writing Without Tears,” which gives an excellent overview of the methodology used at the beginning of this program. There is even an example you could try out with your son to see how he might do with this approach. Although the website is very confusing, you can contact the company by telephone for very helpful advice.

I’ve looked at the writing-edu site and you’re right it’s extremely confusing. Are there lesson plans included or do you have to make up your own? I’ll check out the forums at welltrainedminds.com. I’m also looking at this program [url=http://www.createbetterwriters.com/CWPInfo_OrderInfo.html]Create Better Writers[/url] and what I like about this is that it’s divided into lesson plans. Plus the cost is attractive as compared with writing-edu.

Thanks for your suggestions.

IEW is actually a program to teach you how to teach your son. It is a series of videos or DVDs where Andrew Pudewa instructs you on how to teach. What I did was buy a student workshop intensive which your child can view and work along with. I would buy the most advanced of these workshops. He can do this independently, but if you could be in the room while he’s doing this, that would be great as you would gain an understanding of the techniques and what to look for when you help him edit his assignments.

The SWI has four tapes with one lesson each (some divided naturally in half)and a notebook providing materials for each taped lesson; after each one, you should give similar assignments until he has it down. This is not as difficult as it might seem. For the first two tapes, your child is rewriting someone’s else’s writing and you just need some paragraphs from nonfiction books he enjoys and some very short stories like Aesop’s fables or Greek myths—you can find some of these online. The third tape deals with writing reports. The notebook will contain material for reports on one subject, which could be reused a time or two. For practice in other reports, some researching will be necessary. Andrew suggests animals as the easiest—start with a World Book entry on elephants, for example, come up with two other sources on them, then apply the techniques. (On the site, you can some supplements containing reference sources on animals like those in the notebook.)

The last tape is writing about things you already know about, and nothing really is needed except him bringing together information in his head about subjects he knows about: cars, baseball, his school, his family etc. This is demonstrated on the tape.

SRA Reasoning and Writing has scripted teacher presentation books and is an excellent program. Costs less on ebay than buying from SRA.

http://www.sraonline.com/index.php/home/curriculumsolutions/di/reasoningandwriting/leveloverviews/1119

Janis

My favorite program for writing is CHarlotte Morgan’s _When They Can’t Write_, but I’m a little biased because she was a teacher at the college-prep school for LD kids where I taught :-) It was published by York Press but now can be had from http://www.proedinc.com and it’s all laid out for you, starting with “what’s a noun” practice for the subject, work with verbs for the predicate, and then building on sentence patterns. It’s very effective for students who can’t organize their thoughts well and figure out which words go where.
If he’s past that then she’s got a newer tome out, “When the Writing Gets Tough,” which organizes the more advanced thinking of writing.
Another cheaper little book that is full of ideas (but you have to make up more practice with them) is Diana Hanbury King’s _Writing Skills for the Adolescent_ (which can be had from www.rlac.com ) .
It really takes somethign as structured as the SRA or Ms. Morgan’s book (and probably the IEW; I don’t have experience with it) for these skills to stick - there’s a *lot* of stuff out there that I tried, but I could tell watching that it just wasn’t sticking; it was so much handwriting pratice.

Ooooo! The Charlotte Morgan book sounds great! DS definitely has serious problems getting his thoughts organized and down onto paper. He’s never gotten much past noun, verb and subject of a paragraph. I ended up ordering both books.

The descriptions sound like this may be what I’ve been searching for. DS needs to taught every little thing. I cannot assume that he will make the connections that a non-LD child makes. Sometimes he does but most of the time he doesn’t.

IEW and SRA sound like good programs but I’ll try the Charlotte Morgan books first.

Maybe they’ll help me because even though I’m excellant at math, an engineer be education, I’m a terrible writer and it’s always been very difficult for me.

Sue,

I had the pleasure of meeting Charlotte Morgan at our state IDA this year. I had the good fortune of running into her at the buffet dinner at the hotel and we talked awhile. I did not attend her sessions as most of her focus is secondary level, but I did enjoy talking with her very much.

Janis