I've shared how we Plot A Course for Language Arts before but that covered the what and not so much the how. Today I am stopping on one of the resources we use for writing on our way to the goal of essay-writing. This is meant as an example of how you can facilitate learning to write without spending a fortune or being overly complex. I do find my student does require explicit instruction and activities that require accountability or no progress is made. This is my solution.
The resources I will review today are Writing Fabulous Sentences & Paragraphs (WFSP) and my Land of Kakiak Weekly Paragraph Packet (WPP). You can see I am focusing on the paragraph level today. My student began this study at the age of 10, he's now 11. He had completed the Gentle Grammar series and McGuffey Copywork prior to beginning. This post contains Amazon affiliate links for some resources, so I'll earn a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no cost to you.
The next step was to get him to organize his own thoughts and put them on paper. This was harder than I anticipated so I found a book to support him. The aforementioned WFSP. We worked through this book. I would do the concept introductory lessons with him to make sure he understood the concept and then beginning the next day he would work the activities for that skill, with me checking his work at the end of the day, until he came to a new concept and then we would start the cycle over.
Once we got through the book I started printing out the WPP for him weekly. This packet has a weekly schedule that has him review a specific concept taught in the book (it provides what pages to review) and then walks him through writing a paragraph that week. The goal is to try to use the writing concept in that week's paragraph but I'm not overly strict about this. Sometimes just getting complete sentences is a victory, we have to meet them where they are. I may have my student work this same practice multiple times with different writing prompts or rewriting previous paragraphs so they can be improved. I also think this could be used in conjunction with other subjects like history and science. You could use the subject matter as the writing prompt.
This week we used camping as the writing prompt as he had already completed a web for camping in the book. The skill focus was Super Sentences. Here are a few pages from this week's packet. There is a page for each day.
I don't feel the need to constantly buy new resources. I heard something recently about going up and not out. It means to go deeper into things instead of constantly adding more. It was in the context of hobbies but I think the same could be true for academics. Like, let's get REALLY good at the paragraph level instead of rushing on to multiple paragraphs or reports or something. Back to the weekly packet.
I give my feedback as he goes and then the last day of the week he turns in a final paragraph. He's getting such good practice and it gives me this scaffold to work from so I'm not giving too much feedback or trying to come up with lessons each week. It's already planned for me. I'm an open and go kind of gal.
I hope this has been helpful to you in some way. An RC family may choose to get involved in the teaching of writing if they feel they need to. It doesn't mean our child won't be an independent learner. I am careful to plan each intervention in such a way that makes my role as small as possible so as not to create dependency.
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