I’m planning material for next year’s class. I will be teaching American History and Literature to 9th graders–two hours per week. I think it will be fun. We’re using Notgrass American History, The Grammar of Poetry, and Short Stories in American Literature. The students will be reading the Notgrass literature selections as part of the History work. For literature, they’ll be studying the short stories and analyzing these. We’ll spend a 1/2 semester on poetry analysis. And we’ll finish up the year with something like The Red Badge of Courage, so that they can analyze a longer work.

The reason for this is many, but the greatest benefit is that I don’t have to read a whole bunch of material during the summer and during the school year to be able to teach them literature. I wish I had time to do more, but I don’t. I still have to keep up with my own children’s work at home. I try to read as much of their material as I can during the summer. I’m still writing my own material.

So we’ll be analyzing many of these short stories per the Teaching the Classics material. It’s a great program.

Overall, besides the benefit to me and my time, I think this will be much better for the students as well. They will cover more authors, more selections, and hopefully, will have a clearer view of the various literary periods.

I have to admit, I have not checked to see if the book is arranged by literary periods. This is my next task. I assume it is; but, if it isn’t, I’ll have to rearrange the order in which we tackle the stories.

And I don’t know about everyone else, but I think shorter works are easier to work with especially for 9th and 10th graders. They’ll learn the techniques of analysis much easier,. They shouldn’t be overwhelmed by the reading material itself. So the longer works of Notgrass are basically becoming readers for us in the vein of the Sonlight readers.

Obviously, I was in a hurry. But a few posts earlier, I wrote up the grading rubric that I’m using with my students at co-op.

Before implementing this scale, all of the elements addressed were taught. And the students received grades for their work, but over time I noticed that there wasn’t much improvement on the part of half of my class of students.

Now, I am getting emails from some parents that want to thank me for the improvements they see in their children’s papers. I wish I could say that I was receiving this type of feedback from everyone, but that simply wouldn’t be true.

About half of my students aren’t progressing as much as I would have liked them too. They are improving, but they keep reverting to the same mistakes over and over.

So, I decided to purposely give lower grades to all of the students for rough drafts. The drafts are checked by me for the elements I listed in the previous post. After they receive their initial grade, I give them their papers back to revise and edit. After the edits are complete, they turn in both papers. (I have had a couple of papers turned in to me twice with no revisions. To eliminate this temptation, they have to turn in the first draft and the revised paper.)

The second time around, I regrade the paper and when the edits are complete, they get at least a 10 point increase. I’m not sure how much I want to give them an increase, because I’m sure that some “thinking” child will throw together an awful paper over a one hour time period and let me edit to my heart’s content, with the hope that I will point out all of his or her mistakes for him or her and thereby eliminate the need to self-edit.

So I’m thinking a ten point increase for edits, with an option for extra credit for the extremely hard worker.

I came across a blog somewhere with a pretty profound thought. He said, and I paraphrase,

–Children will learn what is needed for testing–

Yes, I think that all of us do this in areas that aren’t our passion. So I’m trying to teach to the reluctant writer, the student that doesn’t want to put pen to paper. And I’ve got to think of all the ways he is going to try and get out of it.

See, this is one of those issues that is different between co-op and home. At home, there is no easy way out. My kids do it my way, because I’m involved with every step of the process. At co-op, I’m having to learn how to be involved in as many steps as possible, without being there.

It’s tough, but it’s worth it.

Honestly, for my daughter, I can’t remember. But for my son, I’ve learned a few things.

A couple of years ago, his sentences were structured all crazy. He also narrated in such a way that he’d miss out on some important details. Sometimes he narrated in everyday common, informal words. I knew he wasn’t ready.

Now, he narrates in a such a way that the structure of his sentences sound just right. In fact they sound very, very good. He has varied sentence beginnings and he uses words properly and formally.

Now, he has to learn to condense the story down more. I’m trying to have him summarize the beginning, the middle, and the end. Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And every child can tell you what those are. And my 9 year old can tell me what those are too, but to identify what those are and to word those three parts with transitions so that they flow together, even though the details aren’t there, does take another level of skill. That’s what I’m working on with him.

My daughter is already there.

She has moved on to creating an outline from her summation. I’ll probably talk about that tomorrow.

Okay, I realize it’s not entirely problematic to adhere to a set lay out in any subject area. It’s absolutely beneficial to do it in math, for instance. But, from my personal experience, more often than not, a curriculum that is so laid out where it is planned to T in a skill subject can be detrimental and not beneficial to some children. The reason? Well, not all children are learning at the same rate as the schedule.

There is no strict rule that says that all first graders have to be able to read x number of words or at x level by the end of the school year. Those reading levels and such are just guides, and not everybody follows them.

After having 4 kids, I’ve finally come to understand this. My kids are so different. Why would I judge my 9 yo son’s reading ability compared to where his sister was when she was 9? He is a different person, he has different interest, and he has different eyes. He even has an eye tracking problem with one eye that can give him headaches and make reading in the car almost impossible.

And my daughter? She reads a book a day. She loves to read. But should every child read as much as she does? Absolutely not. She is not a super active child and has some problems with her feet. That slowed her down with walking and all other physical milestones. By being behind in some areas, she has gravitated toward what she loves.

When I use a curriculum, I try to tailor it to meet my child’s needs. For instance, if the math lessons are too redundant, we speed it up and skip some problems. If the math is too hard, I pull out a workbook that has more practice problems in the trouble area, and we park there for a while. I let each of my children dictate their pace of learning.

The only areas where I see there may not be a need to do this are in content areas. There is a lot of history and science information that can be learned. And I’ve learned to adjust what we’re doing for my daughter by giving her 5 books to read to my son’s 2 books to read. (My daughter is almost 11, son 9 1/2)

I like curricula that I call open-ended. Those that present my children with as much information as possible, and then allows them to spew out what they can. That is why I like narrations so much, no child fails at narrations.

For us this is really working. My daughter told me this weekend that the Trojans eventually got their revenge. When Aeneas escaped, his grand children eventually founded Rome. And Rome eventually defeated the Greeks.

She also came next to me yesterday, sat by me, and said, “You know, Hitler and Haman were a lot alike. They both wanted to destroy the Jews.” She had just finished reading about Persia in Ancient History and last year we studied modern history. Evidently, it’s all starting to come together for her.

Now if she were a few years older, I’d have her write a comparison contrast paper on Haman and Hitler. Shucks, I’d do it today if she knew how to outline well enough, do the research, and then write it. Problem is, she can probably write it, but she is still learning to outline, and she hasn’t done much research other just reading.

(Sorry for the grammar, the country in me started coming out)

Absolutely not. I didn’t believe it first, until I actually wrote Write from History.

First of all, Charlotte Mason made the program so easy. Copywork, narration, and dictation is really all that elementary students need. And you don’t need a writing curriculum to make it happen.

For copywork, select a sentence from literature that your student is reading. It can even be Frog and Toad. There are some really well written sentences in Frog and Toad. And they have months and seasons and all kinds of elements that children need to cover.

For narration, your student has to simply retell an experience that he or she has had. It doesn’t even have to be from a story. Practice first by having your child narrate his or her day. Have him narrate the adventure he had with his sister. He can even narrate a TV show. It helps him with recall, with putting his own ideas into his own words. It also helps him to practice speaking in one verb tense.

After your student has copied a sentence, try dictating it to him the next day. Or better yet, mix up the words and make a new sentence using words he already knows.

I made my Write from History books after I realized that I needed to have something organized for me that I didn’t have to think about. Plus I wanted it to be tied into our history lessons to help save us time.

But organized or not, any parent can teach an elementary student to write simply by using copywork, narration, and dictation. And it doesn’t have to follow a specific schedule or layout.

Just meet your student where he is and he’ll be fine. If your son can write two sentences, they have him write two. If he can do a paragraph easily in second grade, then have him do a paragraph. There is no magic schedule. The schedule should be set by where your student is, and with consistency he will learn to write well.

So far all of my posts are about writing. I can’t help it; it’s my new passion.

Here is a grading guide that I made up for my co-op class. I’m still working out the kinks.

I plan to use it next year for the classes I’ll be teaching.

Error Points lost

General Structure
Not double-spaced 15 pts each
Thesis statement missing or misplaced 10 pts each
Thesis doesn’t reference the topics of the 3 body paragraphs 15 pts
Paragraph missing (5 paragraph papers when studied) 20 pts each

Grammar
Misspelled word 2 pts each
Capitalization/punctuation 3 pts each
Sentence Fragments 5 pts each
Run on sentence 5 pts each
Comma use 5 pts each

Paragraph structure
Lack of topic sentence 5 pts per paragraph
Lack of transition sentence between paragraphs 5 pts per paragraph
Lack of clincher sentence for the very last paragraph 5 pts
Insufficient supporting details 10 pts

Sentence level
All sentences begin with a subject 10 pts per paragraph
(sentence openers should vary)
All sentences are approximately the same length 10 pts per paragraph
(don’t forget to vary sentence length)

Word use
Awkward sentences 5 pts each
Informal language 3 pts each
(got, a lot, contractions, guys, slang)
Use of “I, you, me, my, mine, or we, your” 2 pts each
(Unless the paper is an opinion piece)
Pronouns used without indicating the noun being referred 5 pts each
Improper verb tense (should be past tense) 10 pts