Whew...

One of my biggest ongoing worries has been Harry's writing. He reads a ton but has never been one to make up stories about his animals or anything that I would say is a precursor to writing. He's done narrations and we did most of Writing with Ease and all of Sentence Island, but it still was a nagging worry in the back of my head. The schools around here also do a lot of writing, starting in kindergarten. Seriously. One of Annika's prompts was "The cloud in the sky looks like.." and they had to write three sentences about it. It's a little ridiculous.

Anyway, we started Writing with Skill last week and we're planning to start Paragraph Town in a few weeks, so we aren't lacking in curriculum. But I was still worried. Harry hated the first couple of days of Writing with Skill and the work I saw didn't help. So yesterday I sat down next to him and went over exactly what I expect from him for his WWS assignments. I stayed next to him while he worked and didn't let his frequent sighs and moans distract him or make me feel like the ogre he sometimes thinks I am .

Lo and behold, his assignment yesterday was better. I was really impressed. He didn't like actually doing the work, but hey, he's ten, he doesn't have to. But the writing he gave me was good. I know that WWS and the fact that it takes you through exactly how to do the assignment helped, but I liked how Harry used words.

Today I wasn't able to sit next to him, so again I was concerned. And again, he impressed me. This was a longer assignment and he did really, really well. There were seven well-formed sentences waiting for me.

So, in short (haha), I think Harry's problem is with the actual writing, not writing. I'll have him try typing the next assignment out, instead of hand writing it. And maybe we can turn something that makes both of us scream into something tolerable.