Carrie, Julie, or NE1 - ? about "free" writing

[lmercon]

I love the CM way of educating my dc and have used HOD for several years. My ds was recently diagnosed as moderate/borderline severe dyslexic. One of the recommendations that the tester gave was for him to begin keeping a journal or a collection of stories. I asked her what the purpose of it was, as it pertained to dyslexia. She answered that it is important for all children, including dyslexics to free write and enjoy written expression. As a former ps teacher, I'm used to that train of thought. However, as I have learned more about the CM methods, I'm more convinced of the benefits of modeling writing from excellent passages written by gifted authors and poets. Looking back, I can see why we teachers struggled so much to correct poor writing. We had encouraged poor writing right from the get-go by giving first graders blank paper and saying, "Go for it!" By fourth grade, I was attempting to undo years of poorly formed literary habits.

Anyway, my question is this - Do you encourage creative "free" writing?

Thanks,
Laura

[Tansy]

I think its all about your approach. I have dyslexia and I was going to be put in remedial writing. Between my 7-8 grade (summer) my Father encouraged me to read (a good list of books) and I one of my chores was to write a paragraph every day about any topic and had to be 5 lines long, Or instead I could write poetry. No body graded them, corrected my spelling or punctuation. But Dad did sit down with me and discuss them, not always but pretty often. How else could I have said it? Did I use the right words. Maybe I should have put line 4 before line 3... he would model better sentences than those I had written, etc. I retested at the beginning of 8th grade and was not placed in the remedial class. Tho My 8th grade teacher used to tell me "Use smaller words that you know you can spell!" it was the age before computers.

So I think it's how you incorporate the writing as to wether it will be effective. I could have written a whole bunch of junk and never gotten feed back and never moved forward. My Dad also never belittled me he always approached it very very gently and would often write a poem while I was doing my writing. So we discussed our work and I could make suggestions and change words in his work as well. I wrote lots of poetry since that was in my mind easier!! it maybe took 30 min out of his day. I ended up with a very conversational style of writing.

[Tree House Academy]

I have a degree in English and have been a professional writer in my career (when I worked). I was always just good at writing - it came very naturally to me. While I did read a lot and write to models, I also wrote creatively. I think that, without that creative outlet, writing would not have interested me as much as it did. There were times that I would start writing something for school and then, in my free time, embellish it and make it into a short story or even a small novel. It was that freedom of creativity that sparked the joy of writing for me. I think that your ds keeping a journal is a wonderful idea. I think that modeling correct writing during school hours is key and important, but allowing creativity and writing for fun in a child's free time is also something great!

[Carrie]

Laura,

I agree with the ladies' wise responses in this thread. During our school hours at our house we make sure that we copy correctly and do the writing assignments as planned in the guide. In my kiddos free-time though they write creatively often. I do not edit that type of writing, but after they share it with me (after I've complimented the creativity first), I will often mention one main thing I noticed that they could correct.

With my younger kiddos, until they have some fairly good spelling skills, I have them dictate what they want to write to an older sibling or to me one sentence or two at at a time. Then, they copy the writing one line at a time on their own. The reason I've moved to doing it this way in the younger years is that after years of allowing kiddos to free write any which way they wanted in my public school days, because it was all the rage back then, I have become much less enthusiastic about that type of writing until kiddos know some basic grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Otherwise, it is truly practicing poor writing habits simply to get the ideas out on paper. Yet, the habits are still being formed.

So, I prefer copying from a correctly written model even when writing creatively for my kiddos in the younger years instead. I hope that helps!

Blessings,
Carrie