Write with the Best Difficulties

[gotpeace91]

OK, we did Vol 1~Unit 1~Day 3 today in WWTB. The kids were supposed to mark the parts of speech in an excerpt of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This is really hard to describe but I will try. They were to underline the adjectives with red, the adverbs with blue, the verbs with green, and circle the nouns. They were only supposed to mark the descriptive words and they weren't sure which ones to mark and which ones not to. I wound up making a copy of the story and highlighting the words they were supposed to mark.

I looked at the answer key to get an idea and they have all the words listed according to part of speech in alphabetical order. ??!! So I made a copy of the story and went through each line of words and marked them appropriately so I'd have a score key. It took a loooong time. I didn't see how an alphabetical list of words was going to help me with checking it though. Kind of aggravating.

Anyway, my daughter struggled with reading some of the words and my son could read them but had to ask what some of them meant. They got a Bunch wrong. It was kind of discouraging because I thought they were doing so well with R&S but I guess maybe the combination of the hard words and having to find all the parts of speech at once threw them for a loop. It took them a very long time to finish it. So much so that I didn't make them do all the corrections because they were getting worn out with it.

I'm not sure what to do about it . It just really seemed to be way over their heads. But I'm worried because shouldn't they be old enough to be able to do this? Here's some pics of what we did today. The one without the purple x's is the score key that I made.

[patekake]

I totally understand what you mean. Last year when my dd did this, we both found it confusing. I am definitely not saying that we did it correctly, but we worked through a couple of paragraphs each time she had this assignment. I feel the purpose of this assignment is to dissect the sample so they can use this model in their writing. While we never could pick out all the words, she was able to use what she had learned in her writing. My dd's paper looked similiar to your dd's on this particular assignment. She ended the year with extrememly high scores on her achievement test in the grammar area. I just wanted to encourage you to continue as we had more understanding of this as the year progressed. You are in for a treat with CTC this year!!! Enjoy!

Patti

[gotpeace91]

Thank you very much for the encouraging post, Patti! Higher scores on the achievement tests would certainly be motivation for me to keep plugging away at it. Maybe I will lessen the amount of the passage they have to do next time and then go over the rest of it together with them.

[LynnH]

I had looked at the samples of Write with the Best and was very concerned about this exercise being overwhelming for my ds. When I saw Carrie at the convention I asked her about it and she said to not have him find all of them. Just have him find some of them. I think I am going to tell my ds he only has to find a certain number of each one. Maybe 6 of each to start out with and maybe increase it some as the year goes on.

[gotpeace91]

Oh thank you, Lynn, that sounds like a great idea! I'm going to try that too. I think my kids will respond well to a *hunt* for the words if they know there is an end in sight.

[deltagal]

I think of this exercise as being more process than product oriented. And it is one of the reasons I REALLY like WWTB. It is a very challenging exercise and you only do it one time in each unit, but the process does begin to imbed in your child's brain how words work and how to build sentences. I found it incredibly difficult the first time we did this and I kept looking at the key, etc. But once it begins to click with your child and they begin to recognize SOME of the parts of speech it really is neat. It begins to transform their writing. You might even set a timer and say, "oh, let's just see how many we can identify in x number of minutes." I would not dwell on this.

[my3sons]

The first time we did this, I tried to have my ds find them all too. He had a very difficult time with this. Then I saw the note at the bottom of the WWTB plans that said "...Students who do not have experience using descriptive parts of speech should not be expected to find every descriptive adjective, verb, adverb, and specific noun. If they find some, this is sufficient." I took that advice and ran with it! We just moved fairly quickly through the activity after that, with my ds finding the words as best he could, and me checking for them on the key and helping him identify the part of speech they were. We spent around 10 minutes or so on this and then stopped. He got better and better at it throughout the year, and he learned a lot about recognizing vivid descriptions and trying to incorporate some in his own writing.

For learning to be balanced, at the start of the year, there should always be some things that students know how to do quite well already that are more review in nature. There should also be some things that students have a foundation of the skill, but are building on that and need to learn some new things to strengthen it more. Then, last, there are completely new skills that are going to be very challenging to begin with, and that students will not really come into their own with until the very end of the year, or maybe even not until the next school year, when that skill moves into the "building on the foundation level". If a child is properly placed, there will be some of each of the 3 levels of skills in a guide for them. You just touched on a challenge skill in CTC with this portion of WWTB. We did too last year with it. I'd just encourage you to set an amount of time to do this specific activity, and make it as stress-free as possible. This is a challenging introductory skill that dc need lots of time to grow into, so just approaching it together as a team and making it an activity you do together really helps dc not be so stressed about it. HTH!

In Christ,
Julie

[gotpeace91]

Thank you Julie and Florence! I will definitely put a reasonable time limit on it next time and do what I can to make it less stressful. I am looking forward to seeing their progress in this area. I totally missed that note at the bottom of the page or I would have run with it too, Julie! I do think it could be sort of fun for them to see how many they can find and identify before the ten minutes is up.