Writing in CTC
Posted: Wed Dec 11, 2013 5:57 pm
I have a dd that is a reluctant writer. How do I encourage her as she develops new skills in this area? Right now her writing is very basic, and sometimes vague. For example, today she was to write a sentence in the Genesis book to describe her beliefs about our fall into sin. Her sentence was "Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil even though they weren't supposed to." I wanted her to take it a step further, stating that this passed sin onto all people who would follow, but she just couldn't get what I was trying to say. I finally asked her Dad to give a sentence describing our fall into sin, and showed her from his sentence the missing element-that their sin condemned the whole human race. In WWTB when we're trying to write descriptively, she'll write things like, "It was good." I've tried to model what I'm asking for, but I'm afraid that has made her feel like any attempt she makes at writing is bad and now she has this mindblock that she can't do it. How much should I expect from a beginning writer? I should say that her narrations have been very well done, she's just struggling with creative writing, as this is the first year she's ever really done it.
However, she just can't give supporting details very well at this point. Riley struggled with that in CTC with WWTB and with oral narrations for a good portion of doing it. We are now in the last month of CTC, and I see the fruit of all of the work we have done. One thing that helped him was to have him explain "why" he thought what he thought, and that what he said shouldn't be able to apply to just anything. He was still very general in answering this question for quite some time... lots of words like 'stuff,' 'things,' 'good,' 'bad,' ... not the 'stuff' I was looking for. 
I finally realized that he was being very general in his answers rather than specific, and that he needed to realize when to be general and when to be specific. I tried to explain this to him. He didn't get it at first. I finally said 'If you can say what you are saying about just about anything, you're not really saying anything at all. For example, "It was good" can apply to almost anything. "Lots of stuff was in the way" could be almost anything. I gave him examples of how to make things more specific for whatever general thing he had just said, and gradually it began to sink in. It REALLY helped to work on this skill within DITHOR as well. For WWTB, I'd make a list of specific words we came up with together that he had to include somewhere in his writing. For example, if Riley said the sheep would learn a lesson for his fable he was writing... I'd say, "What specific lesson?" He'd say, "Not to do that again." I'd say, "Not to do what again?" He'd say, "Make that mistake." I'd say, "What mistake?" He'd say, "That really bad one."