And here’s one from Thing 2! She read a chapter from Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. She’s working on consistency of tense in her writing.

      A little ten-year old boy named Phillip was a show-off. Phillip’s teacher, Mrs. Periwinkle, recommended that Mrs. Carmody, Phillip’s mom, call Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle said to send Phillip down after school and she’s give him a bottle of show-off powder. Whenever Phillip showed off, he’d turn invisible. That taught him not to show off. 

This is Thing 1′s reading summary from today. She read several chapters from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. This book should be on everyone’s reading list! It’s absolutely beautiful. This paragraph is a huge accomplishment for Thing 1. Because of her language delay, she has always struggled with spelling and grammar. Today I only had to help her with three minor spelling errors, all of which were in big words. She’s finally spelling sight words consistently! She also needed a reminder that she was using dialogue and was able to quickly edit it on her own. Yay for Thing 1!

      Minli ran away to Never Ending Mountain to find the Old Man of the Moon. Ma was horrified when she found out Minli ran away. Ba calmed her and said, “We will go find her and bring her back home.” Minli met a dragon. Minli’s parents met the goldfish man. 

We use Writing with Ease as our main writing program. Some of you might be surprised to know that there is actually very little writing with this approach. There IS a lot of reading, questioning, and summarizing. The goal is to expose the students to rich language and focus on the skill of writing. They aren’t expected to produce original, creative pieces  until they have mastered writing to a point where they are not bogged down with spelling, grammar, and punctuation problems.

I know!!! It’s completely different than the way we taught at my previous school. I was a huge supporter of writer’s workshop. Most of my kids did well with that approach, too, and I think there is a lot of validity and good things going on in those classrooms. However, it’s not a great fit for all kids- nothing is. Thing 1 was a textbook case of a child for whom writer’s workshop did NOT work. She did not retain much of anything with that approach. She couldn’t spell, her handwriting was awful, and writing was a complete chore since she lacked the verbal language skills to accurately portray her thoughts.

I knew I had to find something different when we pulled her out in 3rd grade. I needed a structured approach. At the time I thought I just needed something to “get her caught up.” I found The Well Trained Mind and fell in love with the structure and focus of the philosophy Susan Wise Bauer brings to classical education. Her mother, Jesse Wise, was an elementary school teacher before homeschooling her own children. I bought Writing with Ease, as well as First Language Lessons.

At first, I thought WWE was a complete waste of time. After all, they weren’t writing!!! However, I began to realize that Thing 1′s ability to put together complete a complete thought was increasing, Thing 2′s listening and comprehension improved tenfold, and every day they were having a successful writing experience. Soon enough, Thing 1 began doing just what the program intended- she began to write with ease.

Now they are fourth graders and I felt that tug of the public school teacher inside of me. “But what about creative writing??” I looked at a few programs, but wasn’t impressed by any. I even looked at Step Up to Writing, a very popular and successful program in the public schools. I expected to love it and buy it. I didn’t. It’s amazing how much homeschooling has helped me to be able to clearly identify how my children learn. It just wasn’t a good fit for Thing 1 and Thing 2 really doesn’t need all the extras.

So we continued with Writing with Ease, while the creative writing issue was always in the back of my head. Mind you, my children still write thank you notes, letters, summaries of books they’ve read, etc. It’s not like they don’t write outside of WWE, but we don’t do any formal instruction on story writing.

The other day Thing 2 decided she wanted to write a book. I knew it would be about horses since she’s been obsessed, and I don’t use that term lightly, with Misty of Chincoteague. She whipped out her journal and began to write. She’s been writing for three days. I don’t know where the story will go or if she’ll even finish, but reading what she has so far has made me realize that what we are doing is working. The challenging literature in WWE and the vast amounts of time we devote to reading really ARE making a difference in her language development.

I know I’m not the only WWE mom to have occasional doubts, so I wanted to share with you what she has written. I also wanted to note that Thing 1 has made amazing strides as well. She has a lot of issues that contribute to her writing difficulty, but in one year she went from misspelling EVERY word, leaving words out of sentences, and hating to write, to writing full narrations independently with dramatically improved spelling (which is also a tribute to our spelling program, All About Spelling).

Here is a very small part of Thing 2′s story, A Galloping Horse. I’ve left all of the errors.

There was a shrill whinny from the barn. It was midnight. Olivia and Arline shot from their beds, They pulled on their boots and yanked their sweaters over their heads. Just as they headed up to the door, it opened. It was Mom. “It seems Windy is going to have her colt,” she said. “Arline, you stay with your father. Olivia you come with me and see if she is okay.” Windy had been mating a stallion named Flying Wind. During their mating process a baby had been growing in Windy. Olivia rushed tot he stable behind her mom. They rushed to Windy’s stall. But along the way she grabbed Star’s and Assateague’s halter. “This is the night,” she thought. 

having the entire art museum to yourself.

Our second trip during September was to New York City. We stopped in Hershey, PA on our way up and then stopped in Baltimore on our way home. We spent three days in the city and I was so lucky to have two of my best friends from high school to show us around!