Suggest material to help DS with expressive/creative writing

[mom2boys]

DS is 10 & in 5th grade. He is extremely bright & can talk forever on many subjects. He is having difficulty translating his thoughts & ideas into writing. I have a meeting with a team from his school on Friday. However, it is apparent that I need to teach him these skills myself. I am not sure where to start. Any suggestions on materials I can use?

 

[Parkhopper]

I was in the exact same boat with my DS11. This summer I purchased a book off of amazon which, although repetitive, gave him some really great ideas on how to get started.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/04...623?v=glance&n=283155&_encoding=UTF8&v=glance

DS's main problem is that he is a perfectionist and would not consider putting pencil to paper until he had all of his thoughts perfectly outlined in his head. We did "speed" drills using the workbook above and his teacher this year says he is a very good writer!

Suzi

 

[sharbear]

I have a senior in HS who is the same way. Bright kid, stinks at writing. Going to be an engineer, hope he learns to convey his thoughts.

Don't want to be a pain, but I think it's a boy thing. Not all boys but a lot of them.

 

[mom2boys]

Thank you Parkhopper. That book is even on sale at Amazon.com THink I will slip over to the Education Store & thumb through it, see what else they have.

 

[momsully]

I would love to hear any other ideas on this. DS6 is a great reader but his writing really lags. One of the first grade teachers did a study on the writing skills of boys vs. girls and I am going to her presentation tonight. I am hoping she might have some creative ideas as well.

 

[RUDisney]

Gosh, I wish I had my old CORE books from HS that I could share with you.

Basically, it was structured writing in 5-sentence blocks. A paragraph would be written with the writing style you were to mimic underlined and explained after the sentence. The object was to write a 5-sentence paragraph, paralleling these concepts. It was hard sometimes, but I'm a better writer because of that. It was 4-years worth of this type of learning. It was developed by one of the English teachers at the time.

To better understand how it was structured, the first sentence might want you to use a participial phrase. The second might be parallel structure. The third might want a demonstrative in it, etc.

I don't know if there are any books that you can order that would use this type of structured writing. I hated it in HS, but think it was truly the best way to teach writing.

 

[KelNottAt]

A passive approach (i.e., not real "lessons") might be to ensure your DS is reading a lot, if he's not already. It seems to work with my kids; they're eager writers.

 

[Feralpeg]

When I was teaching sixth grade, I was shocked at how many children had trouble writing. A lot of them had a problem getting started with ideas. I decided to make it a little easier for them. I developed a list with three columns. The first column contained nouns. The second column contained verbs and the third contained adjectives. I numbered each column and put a cover sheet over it. I had each kid pick a number from each column. That determined what they would write about. For instance, they might get elephant, blue and parasailing. I told them they just need to write at least three sentences. Each of their words needed to be used in one of the three sentences. Once the sentences were written, they had to go back and add another sentence following each of the first three they'd written. Pretty soon, they were writing stories. They would finish one and ask to pick more words so they could do another story. It worked very well. Most people have trouble starting to write. Once the ideas get to flowing, they can put them together. It may not be perfect from a grammatical standpoint, but that doesn't matter when first learning to write.

I hope you find something that works for your little guy!