This is sent out by a rather confused homeschooling Mom. I home school – two children. One is 9, almost 10 and a boy and he is in 4th grade. My second one is 8, last week and she is in the 2nd grade. It sounds rather odd for me to be blogging about this but I wanted to get input from any homeschoolers out in blogging land.
The kids are absolutely opposites when it comes to teaching them. My dilemma (right now anyway) is with my youngest, Mandy. Mandy is very intelligent and quite complicated. She is just going in to the area of writing in a small way. She is an absolute perfectionist. I have a book I write in for notes and to keep up with what we are doing – my teacher’s lesson plan, if you will. School has been in session for 4 weeks now, although we lost a week to evacuation. My notes in the last several weeks are as follows:
Wednesday, Aug 31st – Mandy will sit and stare at a paper forever if she doesn’t understand. I can explain it 5 different ways and she just glazes over. How do I get to her? It is like I have to get mad at her and then she will actually hear me.
Tuesday, Sept 13th – She took most of her time (over an hour) puzzling over a sentence she was supposed to write and then she wrote a very complicated 3 sentences. Her mind doesn’t work simply – If you ask her a question and give her enough time she will give you a synopsis of the subject. Is this good or bad?
Today, Thursday – Mandy is still having problems with writing. She either writes a long paragraph or doesn’t write anything. Today, given a time limit (she had been looking at this page for 30 minutes), on a page she accepted a “0” on the paper rather than try and write it in the 15 minutes. It was a series of topics and she was just supposed to make them specific rather than general.
This last one blew my mind because Mandy is a straight 100+ student. She doesn't’ get one wrong or 1/2 wrong she gets everything right and her grades are very important to her. But she accepted a 0 without comment.
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to make this easier for both of us? I know writing is hard for her – she is so deep thinking that it takes forever and then she gives me masterpieces and she just turned 8.
Help!
5 comments:
Is she a purely visual learner? You can tell me something a hundred times but if I don't see it.... and it only takes once if I see it. My thought is to have lots of examples of what you expect. I have to see it, and writing I'm not a big draft person. I think about it for a long time, then write and then I only have to fix punctuation. That's just how I work. Maybe she's the same way?
The above comment is good to consider. You could also try having her jump rope or bounce on a mini trampoline while you are talking about the subject. I often found that my son who has brilliant ideas struggled with taking in what I said. Once we figured out and took care of the food allergy (a BIG culprit) he understood more, but movement helped his processing time. He is a definite kinesthetic learner.
What about approaching writing in a different form? Something short and concrete. Haiku! She can practice, she can mull, but it's a limited form of expression.
I'd also stop grading her work for a few months. Remove the need for perfection entirely. Perfectionism can be a HUGE stumbling block to future progress.
It may also be necessary to model failure for her: talk about times you tried and failed, and how it was no big deal. Try something new, now, and talk about how much practice you need, and how you know you'll improve, but it's okay to not be perfect.
Try a whole week of nothing but process lists (how to do X, for instance) or writing recipes (again, limited production, limited need for perfection).
When I was that young, I was capable of very good composition. However, I was praised for it ("You're such a great writer!"), and that made me highly anxious to produce anything less than great. I also felt a deep sense of failure; while my work was great *for someone of 8*, it wasn't as great as the adult writers I loved to read. Praise over how "great" I was made me doubt the intelligence of the one giving praise, because *I* felt flaws, but didn't know how to identify or correct them. Doing something less than my best felt like even bigger failure, and I could get quite paralyzed! I'm not saying that's going on with your little girl, but it's fairly common with very creative personalities. It *can* be corrected, and that character aspect turned to a positive (self-editing and introspection, working hard for a finished result, becoming a good critical thinker, etc), instead of a roadblock to progress.
I just remembered something. My friend used to take all the heat off of writing by having her kids journal. She would get them a composition book and they could decorate it any way they wanted. The book was filled with pictures and stories and life experiences all done by each child. When writing is all about & for you, it takes a bit of the pressure off.
I like the journalling idea.
I had a girl who would get so upset that she couldn't draw a stick figure correctly that we often had tears. I got a stack of scratch paper, and a garbage can. We tried drawing pictures, decided they weren't right, balled them up and shot baskets. It was a fun way to talk about making mistakes, trying again, and being ok with it.
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