As a homeschooling parent, I constantly find myself re-evaluating how and what I'm teaching my child. I find myself leaning towards classical education (yet I honestly find it daunting). For the rest of this year I'm going to bite the bullet and focus on doing some copywork with Connor. I read a great article, written by Jessie Wise Why Do Copywork and Dictation? which really resonated with me. Some Ideas include using popular novels, and poems for the copywork, as well as incorporating his spelling words. I think this will be extra benficial for handwriting, spelling, grammar and punctuation.
I'm going to try dictation as well. I ran across a great video by Sonia Shafer "Prepared dictation explained" which explains the process really well. I'm inspired! I've been trying to figure out that special "thing" that inspires my 8-year old son to write. He has a very difficult time writing open ended prompts. A lot of the prompts in our workbooks are pretty boring. I thought long and hard about his interests and I came up with "animals".
So now our daily writing program looks like this: 1. My son can browse the National Geographic Kids site for an animal that looks interesting to him. We also receive a subscription to this magazine (A great gift from our friends Sally and Frank!). We just love it! 2. My son reads the informational text out loud (Reading), we discuss any of the vocabulary words he doesn't know (Vocabulary). He looks at the photos, and watches the videos about the animal. He writes down facts he wants to include in his paragraph (Pre-writing). 3. He types his paragraph in WORD (with the spell check turned off) (Typing). 4. After he is done with his rough draft, we copy and paste the paragraph and label it "Revised". We have a conference and spell check and revise his paragraph. I make suggestions of things he can change or add to make it more interesting. 5. After he is satisfied, we copy and paste the revised paragraph and lable it "Final Copy" So on one page I can see his Rough draft, revised copy, and final copy. He is loving it! Writing is the 1st thing he wants to do everyday. I like that he is writing about about things that inspire him, and that he is interested in. As a treat we are going to visit the animals he's been writing about at our zoo and draw pictures of them to go with his writing ! Have an Inspired day! |
AuthorHi, I'm Melissa.. Mom to Connor. Archives
February 2017
Categories
All
|