In our homeschool, every child begins learning how to write during the fifth grade. The assignments are extremely simple, and my expectations are very low, but writing will happen if I have my way.
One year I did not have my way at first. I was so shocked. A very rudimentary assignment to write a simple paragraph reduced my ever-learning son to embarrassed tears. Where was this coming from? This child was a model student, completing assignments on time with a good attitude. We spent several days discussing the assignment for around twenty minutes. This resulted in very little progress.
Finally, after a week of such warming up, he wrote the most ridiculous and lame paragraph I had ever seen. This was preposterous. He had studied how to design a paragraph and how to find mistakes in form. He knew how to begin and end sentences. Yet, for some reason, this bright child produced a block of miserably scrawled words that seldom followed complete thoughts or began with capitals and ended with any punctuation. I could hardly believe my eyes.
Very puzzled, I tried to be kind to him. I scored it only for elementary mechanics, noting all the instances of neglected beginning capitals and end punctuation. Those marks alone made the paper look as if I was very displeased. I was more like disturbed.
I questioned him on why he was having trouble with paragraph writing, and he said it was because he could not think of anything to write. (Yet the assignment included a list of twenty different interesting topics, such as dolphins, birthday parties, and grandpa’s farm.) I was sure my son could find something to say. As we discussed his favorite among these topics, I realized and reassured myself that my son did have thoughts about them. He could think of many worthy statements about his topic, but he did not believe that he could. Even the act of listing his ideas in a simple list, not even in outline form, made him teary-eyed again. It was just killing him. When I showed him his first scored paragraph, he looked stunned. Even he could not believe or explain all the mistakes.
We decided to sleep on it. I knew he had good, coherent thoughts. I had seen him pick disordered sentences out of his textbook assignments and use them to form well-constructed paragraphs. All we needed was a way to get the thoughts out of his head and onto the paper. This seemed to be where the breakdown was. It made no sense to me, but I continued trying to understand and find a solution.
The next day, we were again discussing a paragraph topic, and I told him, “You have good thoughts on this subject. You can tell me what you think just fine. Why not list these thoughts and then make a paragraph from your list, just as you did in the textbook assignments from last week, only with your own thoughts?” He broke down even at this suggestion.
Finally, I decided that if he could tell his thoughts to me so well, he could tell them to a tape recorder. We tried that. He talked to me about his subject. We ran the recorder, then played it back so he could hear it while I commented upon how good his thoughts were. Then we played back each of his sentences while he wrote them down. Finally, we had our list! I instructed him to pick out the good sentences from this list and to order them and write them in paragraph form, just as in his past textbook assignments. He was able to do this without many mistakes. Voila! We had a paragraph. Granted, it was rough and in need of correction, but it was on the paper, it was readable, and there were no tears. I felt we were getting somewhere.
Yes, we were getting somewhere, but really, it would have been much easier just to write the paragraph myself. My son had so far to go before he could pass this unit. He needed lessons that were not in the book. He needed something that most kids do not need. And he needed to be able to achieve it without Mom right by his elbow.
