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Angel
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| Posted: Feb 05 2010 at 7:35am | IP Logged
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I have been contemplating ways to get my oldest (13 yo ds) to write for a long time now. I have looked at lots of curricula. I have left him alone. I have used my own home-grown ideas and assignments. We have seen some success. This year around Thanksgiving I wrote some different projects on the whiteboard for my big kids to try. We had just read a retelling of Beowulf, so one of the projects was to "write your own epic poem." This apparently caught my ds' imagination. He's still working on it in little bits here and there, but mostly, I suspect, because he doesn't like his other writing assignments, which are written narrations.
For a while he was also using the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum daily, but lately... not so much. He likes to read non-fiction -- history and science -- but to write about it? No. Not at all.
So I'm taking a step back and asking myself some questions. I thought I might try to start a more philosophical discussion on writing here to help me answer them. The biggest question I have is:
How do you give a child a *reason* to write?
Some children just seem to be more communicative than others. My ds is rather introverted and somewhat... I'm searching for the right word... goal-oriented. What I mean is that I think he sees no purpose in many kinds of writing. Why keep a journal when you know what happened that day? Why write things down in a blog if nobody's going to read it but your mom and dad and maybe your grandmother who never leaves comments? Why write a narration if it's just your mom giving you schoolwork? What's the purpose in writing a report about Eocene mammals if you can remember most of what you read anyway? (One of the curses of being blessed with a very good memory, I think.)
Of course, *I* know that there are purposes in all those kinds of writing beyond, "Do it because you need to learn to write to go to college." Journals and blogs help you collect your thoughts and form a permanent record of your days, which is fun to look back on when the days fade. Narrations and reports help you to synthesize your thinking and all the jumbled facts that can take up residence in the brain of a person who reads a lot. But I am 37, not 13. And to a 13 year old boy... I think all those reasons are a bit suspect.
Does it do more harm than good to force a child to write without a reason, OR.... does it do more harm than good to let a child neglect writing skills that he will definitely need in the future, which (at 13) seems far-off and hazy?
How does one go about providing a child a real reason to write? Can this even be done?
Is it okay to let a junior-high aged child write only fiction or poetry? I'm a fiction writer. Blogs are about the only extent of my non-fiction, although I always jumped at the chance to do a paper in school... mostly because everything else was boring multiple choice, chapter questions, etc. I think I learned a lot from writing fiction, but the way I learned a lot was to write every day for years and years and years. I did this on my own because I was internally motivated to do it. But what if you're not internally motivated to produce long stories, novels, etc., and it's just more something you're fooling around with?
Lissa's recent post In Praise of Keyboarding made me think hard about the use of technology in writing. My kids resist learning to type. I do not know why. (And now our desktop is dead.) I have also thought about speech recognition software. If a child doesn't have a reason to write, how do you give that child a reason to learn to type? (In case you're wondering, I try to choose my battles as far as what sort of work I have to police around here. In addition to being introverted and goal-oriented, my ds is also stubborn and opionated (I say that most affectionately  ) and most unwilling to do what he considers "boring".)
Well, I think this is probably enough for now. I will probably be revisiting old threads about writing curricula as well, but sometimes I find it more fruitful to question (and sometimes to discover) my own assumptions first.
Looking forward to any thoughts you all might have on the matter...
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Angela
Mom to 9, 7 boys and 2 girls
Three Plus Two
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lapazfarm
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Angela, I think this s a great topic for discussion.
If you'll indulge me, I'll share my son's writing situation as well.
I have a son who also dislikes doing things unless he sees the reason behind it. I mean he is compliant, he will do whatever I ask without argument, but when I can see his eyes glaze over in that certain way, I know the product will be less than stellar.
My son likes to write nonfiction. He used to write daily, on his own time, working on a long fantasy-type novel. He would ask me for input, and I would make suggestions on which parts needed filling out, what was confusing, etc. Then he would go back and write some more. he very much enjoyed the process. About halfway through he kind of outgrew the book he was writing and lost interest in the story and in writing in general.
Then he started One Year Adventure Novel and took off writing with a bang. Again, halfway (or more like 3/4 way) through he lost interest in his story. He began again with another story. Same result.
Now, this may seem like a waste of time, money, effort, etc when the end result is nothing but a stack of half-finished fantasy fiction. But I don't think so. What I am seeing is that he has learned a lot from all of his false starts.Each of his stories is showing more and more maturity, complexity, and skill.His characters are more complex, his prose is richer, his settings more interesting and less like carbon-copies of other stories he has read. He has actually taken my advice, the skills he learned in OYAN, and things he picked up from literature he has read, and applied them to his own writing. He is growing as a writer and finding his voice, slowly but surely.
So, rather than push him to see an abandoned project through to completion, I let him quit mid-way each time.If he feels like he has outgrown his story, that is cause for celebration! I know that eventually, when that magical combination of skills, maturity, and motivation meet in time and place, he will finish one of his stories.
In fact, just yesterday he started a new one. Spent all morning tapping away on his laptop, completely absorbed. I'm excited to see how far he gets this time.
So, as far as fiction writing goes, my expectations are simply that I see growth as a writer, application of skills he has learned, an emergent "writer's voice," an ability to tell a coherent story, and joy in the telling.
I consider all this a huge success, even if he has not yet produced a published book to put up on my shelf!LOL!
This post has been really, really long, so I will address our experience with non-fiction writing in another post.
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Theresa
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MarilynW
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Angela - my twin ds (10)find it hard to do any creative writing on paper - but they love to write using Word - maybe because of the ease of editing. I also let them use www.thesaurus.com and dictionary.com for their writing.
We are using IEW for the first time - they really like All Things Fun and Fascinating (they are in the process of doing an essay on Pecos Bill as I write. I saw your post on the Classical Writing thread. I finally put aside my fear of IEW this year - I have not watched all the dvds - just enough to get started. I am surprised at how well my boys are doing with it. I find that having some idea of "how" to write is helping them with their writing - though (compared to my dd who writes out of sheer joy)they still struggle with imaginative ideas.
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Milehimama
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My daughter loves to write (she's 9). If she can't think of anything to write, she'll copy out of my cookbooks!
My 11 yo son, not so much (and he really needs the practice.) I started him a blog on Blogger for free (locked and private). He loves to update his blog and I even help him with pictures. He does it on his own and the spellcheck helps, some, too.
It's hard for *me* to force them to write - I am, after all, a writer by trade. But not everyone has to be a writer, just literate and able to get an idea across.
I have read that typing/wordprocessing can really help reluctant writers because it takes the drudgery out of the physical act of writing.
Also teaching to edit/correct work is so much easier when you can cut and paste and move blocks of text around.
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lapazfarm
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Well, after I wrote all that I realized I never really addressed the main question:
How do you give a child a reason to write?
Angela, to be honest, I am not sure you CAN give a child a reason for writing, or much else for that matter.
Many may disagree with me (and I'm fine with that) but I am a firm believer that true learning must come from internal motivation. It's the unschooler's mantra..."The child will learn what he needs when he sees a reason to do so."
Certainly you can explain your reasons in terms that you think might resonate with him. But in order to get buy-in, the child has to accept those reasons as his own.
Some kids are more receptive and will more readily accept a mom's well-supported reasonings, but other kids will make it much harder by ignoring or actively resisting what mom says (even if he can see the logic of it) just because Mom is the one who said it! (I have a daughter like this. Thank God she is grown now!Phew!)
So, as far as the possibility of giving a child a reason to write, I declare an unequivocal *maybe*.LOL! Not much help, right?
What I would do in your situation (and what I actually do) is keep prompting, keep challenging, keep encouraging, and keep pointing out situations where excellent writing makes a difference between clear communication and misunderstanding. I'd let fiction writing be light and fun for him, and keep the non-fiction short and sweet until the time comes when he "gets" why it is so important. And I'd make sure I was content with the idea that the time may not come until he has to take a crash essay writing course to prepare for the SAT.
There. My 2 cents, fwiw.
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mary
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I agree with Theresa that you can't give a kid a reason to write. I do think that you can use their hobbies/interests to get them to write. I have been giving my kids (11, 9, 6 and 3yrs) Bare Books whenever I notice that they have an interest in a subject.
So, my 11 yr old is interested in history and science and not keen on writing fiction. I noticed that he is fascinated with WWII aircraft. He builds models, reads about aircraft and watches dogfight movies. I gave him a bare book and he is filling it with pictures and stories about the planes.
My 9 yr old happily writes fiction. He loves animals and is currently filling his book with stories about sea creatures.
What I like about the books is that they are small and keep the project long enough to be fun but short enough to be finished before the kid looses interest. I find that the boys are asking me how to spell words, discussing punctuation and run-on sentences. I could never get them to pay attention to this before and we have tried bravewriter, sonlight LA, and daily grams. The difference this time is that they are writing about something they love.
I wonder if your boy would like to keep a book about his chickens?
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Angel
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| Posted: Feb 05 2010 at 7:36pm | IP Logged
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I'm not sure you can give a child a reason to write either. And I wonder how effective a writing curriculum is without internal motivation. I think this does get to the core of the unschooling vs. more traditional schooling debate: is writing one of those things you just "make" your child do (kind of like what even many unschoolers do with math) OR is it better to leave the timing up to the child, even if as you say, he doesn't find a reason to write until he's about to take the SAT.
I'm not sure about this. In the case of math, we decided to require him to do math because a)we didn't think he would choose to do it on his own; b)we couldn't work it into our everyday life; and c)we knew that he gets very frustrated and overwhelmed trying to learn large amounts of material in a short amount of time. Would he have come around to math eventually, maybe at an even older age than he is now, if we hadn't require him to do it every day? Who knows.
Is writing like math? Well, I'm not sure about that either. I think it's certainly more intuitive for many people than math, tied as it is to speech. So it's probably easier to figure out if you've grown up in an environment that's language-rich. Personally, I think the best instruction for writing is simply to read lots and lots of good books. But at some point, the more practice in actual writing you have, the better you get.
Anyway, if we bring it down to a more personal, practical level, we do have some learning disabilities to deal with -- in planning/organizing and spelling (we let him use one of those hand-held electronic spelling dictionaries, which helps). But I'm not sure how much extra work they require.
So I waffle between finding a very structured curriculum that teaches skills isolated from any real reason for doing them, in the hopes that when the time comes he'll know them, and that the structure will help him actually complete assignments... and leaving him alone aside from some gentle encouragement. Maybe I should look into Bravewriter again. Hmmm.
As far as the fiction goes, I don't want to mess with it too much. I think that fiction can teach a person to write very, very well, but fiction is so much more personal than other kinds of writing. I certainly wouldn't require my kids to write stories if they didn't want to. (Also, Theresa, I never finished a novel until I was in my late 20's, although I started quite a few from the age of 12 on. All those starts *did* teach me quite a bit about writing. I think that's pretty common, actually.)
Thinking a bit more about fiction... maybe it is a good way to learn other kinds of writing after all. Certainly it's more interesting to read essays and other non-fiction (articles, books, etc.) that have a sense of story and character and a good handle on description and dialogue.
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Angela
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ekbell
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I can sympathize with a child who sees no point in writing assignments as I was once one of them (research is fun, actually writing the report is miserable).
I still don't have a diary, I don't write a lot of reports (although there are homeschooling reports that I'm required to write), when I organize my thoughts on a subject I use bullet points, columns and rows with as few words as possible. I've never felt motivated to write a story let alone a novel. The only time I normally feel motivated to write is in discussions such as this.
Looking back as a teen, I'm not sure what would have given me incentive to write. Part of it was the fact that writing was painful and typing required more organizing then I was ready for (computers being less prevalent and not at all portable).
Part of it was that I simply didn't have anything much to say and no one to say it to. I didn't have enough life experience yet to bother attempting to write to a larger audience. I wasn't ready to write without being told exactly what was required of me and most such assignments were boring.
It did have an effect on me, I choose my further education partly based on a desire to avoid pointless writing (I went into math). However, I was able to do all the necessary writing in university.
Long term, between all the reading I've done and the keyboarding course I was obliged to take in grade nine, I've not had a problem writing as an adult when I wish to do so. I have no true regrets for all the writing I avoided doing.
[I do think a small amount of forced writing isn't always a bad thing- my eleven year old is required to do 20mins of writing four days a week-some of which is stuctured writing]
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Natalia
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Angela,
I do treat writing as I do math: it is a requirement. My almost 13 yo son has had two years of IEW. This year he had a semester of IEW and now he is applying the skills learned to writing about books he is reading. He doesn't hate it but he does it and does it well. I don't see him writing on his own-like keeping a journal for example.I don't know if it has to do more with being a boy. I think that to keep a journal or to write fiction, a certain degree of introspection is needed that he doesn't have. I am not saying that he doesn't have a rich interior life but I don't think he has the urgency to communicate it. My 16 yod,on the other hand, has always kept a journal and writes on it frequently.
I am babbling. I guess what I am trying to say that I think it is valid to give the kids the mechanics of writing even if they don't have a reason to write. Writing becomes better with practice and maybe at some point later on, they will have the reason and desire to write and then they will have the bases to work from.
Are you familiar with Bravewriter? One of the things that Julie talks about is that kids need to find their writing voices and one way they do that is by writing on things that interest them. She says that many times kids don't like to write because they are not familiar with the subject. The first step in the writing process is to 'soak up" information. She has the kids read everything and anything they can find on the topic they have chosen.
I saw this week how wise that is. My son was supposed to write an essay on bravery based on the book Number the Stars. He found it very hard because he didn't know much about bravery. Bravery is an abstract concept for a 13 to write about. I could say that it was a senseless thing to have him write about but I think it was valid. He practiced putting things into words, organizing his thoughts, organizing a paragraph, punctuation and capitalization, different openers and dress ups.So even though the content wasn't the best, I don't consider it a waste of time. ( I guess I am contradicting myself some here but it is late and I am not thinking straight so I'll stop 
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Bethany
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Wow, I actually work up this morning at about 2:30 thinking about such things  . I am 31 weeks pregnant, so that doesn't help.
I'm with Ekbell, I dreaded most every writing assignment I was ever given. Just like I hated most every book I was required to read. My oldest is only 7 but I have a feeling I may be a radical unschooler before it's all over.
I have always hated forced and contrived assignments of any kind. I always did them and, for the most part, did them well, but I never enjoyed them. To this day, I remeber my 11th grade English teacher and the horror of that year. I hated every moment in her presence. I had always been an above average student, mostly because I did what I was told, but she gave me a C on an essay. I couldn't believe it! Well, the next time around I really worked on my essay. I edited and proofread over and over. I had my mom read and edit. I knew it was much better than the last, but I really didn't get any better grade. There was simply a personality conflict between the two of us. From that year on I hated writing.
In college I put off taking a required literature course until my final semester because I knew it would require writing. We had to meet with the professor to discuss our papers once during the semester. When I met with her she told me how wonderful my paper was and asked if I had considered being an English major  ! I politely told her that, no, I was graduating in a couple of months with a Finance degree and had no intention of being an English major. She did write me a recommendation for grad school .
I just started reading Guerrilla Learning by Grace Llewellyn and Amy Silver and that is what woke me up in the middle of the night. They describe school as a place where "Subjects are artificially seperated from one another. It's as if schools believe that if you give kids one tree at a time, year after year after dreary year, the kids will save the trees up and eventually make a forest out of them."
They wrote this mainly for people who do have children in school and explain that school does not to have define your child or family. Also, that school probably won't help your child find and develop their strengths, grow as whole, healthy, vital people, or find their calling in life. That is what has me most distrubed. I wonder who I would be today if I had been given the freedom and time pursue my own interests. People always talk about finding your "passion", I have no idea what that means or what mine might be. Maybe it would have been writing if I hadn't of had year after year of meaningless assignments that I cared nothing about except finishing.
Also, I wonder is it really necessary for everyone to write a book report, term paper, or the dreaded "What I did over summer vacation" essay. If someone's calling is mechanical or mathematical, maybe not.
But what do I know, I'm not at that point in my homeschooling career yet. I've just been doing an immense amount of reflection on my own path in life and thinking about the aspects of my schooling that stand out, one of those being writing. I was one of the compliant children who always did what was asked of me even when I knew it was meaningless and dumb. I wish I had been more of a rebel who didn't depend on the A's quite so much and maybe I would have found my passion.
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Bethany
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Barbara C.
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First of all, I see typing lessons as a MUST up there with learning to write manuscript. In this day and age, the computer is used for EVERYTHING. So for the sake of speed and precision it is important to know how to type. It also has health ramifications for things like carpal tunnel and trigger finger issues, which can be exacerbated by bad typing skills.
Here's the thing....I don't think you can give a child a reason to like writing or want to write on their own. Either they find it themselves or they don't. However, you can give them a purpose for their writing, like improving their understanding of grammar and spelling.
For instance, when I was in 7th and 8th grade I had the same English teacher both years. We were required daily to write on a journal topic assigned by him (Friday was our choice). The first month each entry had to be a minimum of 50 words, then ten words were added each of the following months.
But he didn't stop there. When we studied the different purposes of writing (narrative, persuasive, etc) we had to write in the top margin what our purpose was and demonstrate it. When we got to diagramming, we had to diagram the first and last sentence that we wrote. Sometimes we would swap with each other for proofreading experience. And every so often we would have to rewrite a journal entry and turn it in for a grade. He used it as an exercise for demonstrating grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc using our own writing rather than just dry passages from a textbook.
The journal topics might vary between the serious or the silly (I remember one was "deodorant".) There were some topics that produced stories out of me 5 times longer than the minimum requirement, and others where I struggled to come up with 60 words without saying "very, very, very, very, very...."
I mean, you probably didn't hesitate to make your kids learn how to brush their teeth properly even when they thought it was pointless? At some point every person needs to know the basics of how to write properly, because writing (mainly in the form of e-mail) is the primary form of communication these days. Besides college issues, if you can't write decently you increasingly will have a hard time functioning in society.
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Barbara
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amy_payson
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So Angela,
I've been thinking a lot about your question ever since I read it a week ago. (So sorry this is so long in coming.) My own son (who's only 8 and is much more logically bent) HATES writing. The physical part of the writing is too difficult for him (he's a perfectionist and writes slow and pushes too hard even though I've tried explaining otherwise to him)and he does not have a big imagination. He is an avid reader, has a big vocabulary and good grammar skills (for his age). We do not do a formal writing program but occasionally I do make him write out his narrations (which he also loathes but I make him do and he's gotten so much better at). This gives us a chance to go over grammar practically as well as a way to work on the sequencing of his thoughts, sentence structuring and so on.
I don't make him write daily but about every other week or so we do this. Some days I just want to quit because of all the grumbling from him and my weakness for not following through with things. But I do see value in it. He will encounter writing as an adult no matter what field he enters. He needs to know how to think, take those thoughts to paper, and organize them. I believe that requiring narrations every so often from his reading and then occasionally turning them into a writing exercise is a good way to learn these skills. Narration forces us to put into words the information we know (not as easy as it sounds) and order our thoughts. Writing that out forces us to see our weakness or reminds us of stuff we missed. I see him making progress and that is enough incentive for me to follow through.
I follow your blog because your teaching style (and chaotic household) very much follow mine! I am much more persuaded to the child-led learning with a Montessori manipulatives approach. SO I am constantly at odds with the own contradictions in my head over education, if that makes sense. I hope this helps.
I've just read a few really good articles in Home Educating Family magazine on writing if your interested in reading them. Might give you perspective.http://www.wellplannedday.com/
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4Real Forums : Living Literature
Topic: a reason to write
