Writing With Ease Update

I am so greatful for this book. It has finally given me direction in establishing an early writer. Oldest Peep would melt into a puddle of tears at any mention of writing. Not the physical act, but the creative aspect of it. Middle Peep would form scribbles he called letters but they really were indistinguishable. Enter Baby Peep! I was determined not to produce one or the other.  This writing monster had to be conquered and I had to find a way. Enter WWE. It is like Susan Wise Bauer heard my pleas for a step by step manual. When I read the samples for Chapter 3 found here, I knew this was the program for us.

So far, we are 5 weeks into it and while Baby Peep doesn't love it, his work has improved in just that short time. His copy work is going faster and faster and he needs less of my attention for this part. I don't always have to sit right next to him and anticipate his errors and try to remind him to think it through. For example, he would constantly start sentences with lower case letters. Now 3 out of 4 times he is doing the capital letter on his own. He still forgets the ending punctuation but we are working on that. His letters have become one size and he is thinking through writing his letters like a lower case p and an a. He use to write the P on the line without the "tail" below the line and then the a the same height. He now consistently writes the p hanging down on the line and the a as big as the circle part of the p. If I rememebr I will look for examples and scan them (tomorrow as Papa Peep is asleep and that would surely wake him) so you can see it.

As for narrations, well, they are proving harder than I thought they would be. He is a great storyteller. I can start a story and he can take off, talking for hours. But if I ask him to retell me something I just finished reading is more difficult for him. I have to ask very broad questions and then slowly get smaller and smaller and smaller many times reading the specific paragraphs over and over. It is slow going but I do see improvement. Today from Alice in Wonderland he narrated a scene with me only have to read it twice. The narration was very short and the details were very slim but the general idea was all there. That is improvement.

To summarize, if you were thinking about starting Writing With Ease I vote yes. It has given our beginning writing instruction some direction and a plan to follow. Check out my workbook with a read aloud schedule and loosely coordinated FLL 2 here.

2nd Grade Langugae Arts Schedule

Here we have Baby Peep's Language Arts Schedule. I have included his read alouds, grammar (FLL), and WWE copywork and narration exercises all in one quick glance page for me.  I thought about spelling but that got too complicated and I already had finished my version of the WWE workbook when I thought about it. We are using All About Spelling so I don't think it will be necessary. The FLL lessons start at 72 because we are not done with !st grade FLL just yet. The form is one off of Donna Young's website. This is the direct link to the form.

I hand wrote these and the scanning is terrible but photoshop helped me darken them up a bit. I hope they are helpful to someone in some way.

Writing With Ease

I finally received my copy on Wednesday. I finished reading it yesterday. Now there is not much to read since it is mostly a week by week guide. I did skim the pages for year two,three and four but really only spent time in the introduction and then year one. I opted not to purchase the workbook and am up to week 15 in planning our own based on the guidelines in WWE. It lays it all out simply and clearly. We will also use the books he is doing copy work from as our read alouds. Now I don't have to plan another list! I am all about efficient. The only thing that worries me is that the workbooks have integrated grammar from FFL. We are almost onto FFL2. I will have to figure it out. This of course is for Baby Peep. I still plan on switching him over to Classical Writing in 4th grade. I can't wait to see how that works out.