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DS is 8 and we are using Bigger. Do we do the oral narration and dictation to build pre-writing skills? When does story writing start? And do your kids that have been using HOD do well with their writing after this oral narrating and also dictation?

Thanks
Katherine

Katherine,
I can tell you that once you get to Preparing your child will do written narration, which is a form of story telling. We are in week 13 and each week a little more is expected or a little different twist is added to how they do their written narration which is scheduled once a week. Also each week they do a creative writing assignment based on the Poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson. I can tell you these activities have been wonderful for my ds. He is in 5th grade and was in public school up to this year. They did a program called "Writing Workshop" and he started writing stories in 1st and 2nd grade and I so wish he hadn't. Yes he was writing several page long "books", but no thought was given to punctuation, capitalization, sentence structure or spelling. They didn't care about any of that. The purpose was for him to just write. It has produced some very bad habits that thankfully written dictation and the other writing assignments in Preparing are helping to get rid of. I would say as someone who has seen what writing for the sake of writing can do that the way Carrie does writing is a much better than having them write long stories too soon before they have the knowledge of spelling and grammar and paragraph structure to go with it.

Thank you! That makes sense, learn writing correctly in smaller doses. My son HATES anything to do with writing. But it's a part of life.

We do some of our English orally and I have him write part of it. ANd he writes other things each day, I'm working on building it. He's in 3rd grade using Bigger. He has definitely shown improvement since last year, it's not always such toture to get him to write.

I'll make sure we focus on this year well to be prepared next year for Preparing.

Thanks again,
Katherine