I bought Jump In recently and think it will work well for my oldest who is a very independent learner. BUT I am not sure how to assign/schedule it. Could those of you who have used it give me an example of how this works at your house? TIA!
Some “skills” will need more than one day–especially longer writing assignments. So I scheduled a TIME per day, but not schedule a skill to a particular day. We just worked on it every day.
If you are going to be doing AG at some point do you still need Jump In? I looked at it and really liked it but not sure when you would incorporate it. It seems like maybe you would use it in the younger years bf AG?
We do one skill a day, then allow some flexibility for how long to complete papers. They always give a recommendation of days to complete. I was surprised that it’s taking us well over a year to complete(and we’re not doing the 10 min writing prompts). Blessings:)
AG is grammar. This is writing. They are two different skill sets. I use Jump In in 7th and 8th grade. I typically do my grammar program at the same time. It can take longer than a year. That’s OK.
Bookworm…I wish I would have known that. Don’t know why I had one year in my brain!
Lishie….I agree with Bookworm that Jump In is good for 7th and 8th. We use AG in 6th-8th, one season per year. If you use it as written, you can complete in 10-12 weeks each year. However, we stretched lessons by doing labeling one day and diagramming the next….rather than both in one day as scheduled. Took more days, but a better pace for dd. Also, we did Jr AG in 5th. It’s not necessary since it’s the same concepts as Season One of AG(just simpler sentences). But I think it made starting AG easier. Just my .02:)
Bookworm, thanks for the correction. The longer Assignments are broken into Skills, too. We tackle them one skill per day. There could be some skills that take more than one day, but haven’t for us as of it. We miss some days here and ther, so like everything else we simply pick up where we leave off.
We do, on days there isn’t much Jump In (some skills are quite easy.) I tried Teaching the Essay and Teaching the Research Paper from AG but didn’t find it as useful. My kids REALLY responded at first to having the tasks broken down into different pieces, small enough to not be scary. The Teaching . . . books were more like “This is what you do. Now do it.” One way the Sharon Watson books really excel is in helping a student find a topic for writing. This has turned out to be a HUGE headache for my boys and the Watson books really help here. It has turned weeks of agonizing and nagging into a few days. 🙂
So, would it be right to say that you all have your kids work straight through the book? Or do you take the separate topics (opinion, persuasion, bigoraphy, book report, etc) and jump around with them in different orders – treating each section as a separate unit? Is there a necessary order to working through it?
And missceegee (or anyone else) I know you’ve mentioned using Bravewriter before – we have used it some here and I like it, but I can see advantages to Jump In too – did you abandon BW for this, us in in conjunction, or alternate?
I have a 4th/5th grader who is very eager to be writing, he loves writing for fun and keeps talking about these books he wants to write 🙂 – opinions here, do you think this would encourage him (help him find ways to improve and expand his writing) or be laborious and discourage?
Thanks for the link, Bookworm. I like the looks of this for my 6th grader for next year, and possibly my 5th grader. My 6th grader usually likes to write (except narrations, of course ), and my 5th grader is about a year behind where her older sister has been. She finds it difficult to write yet, not just because her hand gets tired (though she complains of that after 3 lines of copywork yet can write 4 pages of nonsense just because), but more because she lacks the experience writing very much yet. I try to require at least 3 sentences in her narrations, and I am lucky if I get 1. Do you think this would help or hinder her writing?
I personally would not do it with a 5th grader. I do not do it until I can get at least a good paragraph as a written narration. I would absolutely not do it with a child who had a difficulty in physically writing. You want the child to be in a place where they can do the thinking of getting info together for an essay, AND the writing, including multiple drafts.