Need Reassurance

First of all, I think you can have confidence in a CM education and the SCM materials, because the people who wrote them have had success with them. You can follow their plans because THEY know what they are doing, even if you feel like you don’t. Sometimes we have to follow someone else’s lead before we figure it all out ourselves (been there, done that).

Second of all, a book that you might find very helpful in terms of turning narration and turning it into higher-level writing is Know and Tell by Karen Glass. You are doing yourself a huge favor by trying to educate yourself about writing so that you can teach it. I did the same thing and I found Glass’s book to be extremely helpful (I have not read the one by Sonya, but I’m sure it’s good, too). I followed many of her guidelines and I am very happy with my high schoolers’ writing.

If boxed programs and classical make you feel worse, then maybe they aren’t for you. I would have no qualms about jumping both feet into CM.

Lastly, don’t panic. You have a good two years left with your 16yo to get him writing, and that is plenty of time. You may find that he progresses quicker than you think because he is older.

Crystal,

I have been teaching my kids for over a decade, following CM methods more often than not.  My oldest has really struggled with writing, which I believe has held back my others.  I finally feel like we are in a good place with writing.  One thing that has really helped is to have a separate composition lesson, apart from their regular books & narrations.  I choose a short passage, and they follow up with a written narration.  Aesop’s Fables is a perfect beginning place.  I plan on gradually increasing the difficulty of the passage as we go.  I’m using some of the early AO/CM readings like Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Stories From the History of Rome, fairy tales, folk tales, mythology, etc. We also narrate after our school readings, but focus on oral narrations for those.

Since my older kids are in high school, I also plan on covering some additional writing styles towards the end of the year.  Narrative style is covered through narration (telling a story).  That leaves expository (inform/explain), descriptive (describe, make a word picture), and persuasive (opinions and persuasion).  We can also eventually work on letter writing formats, play writing, and poetry.  My plan is to have one narrative style narration and one additional style narration each week.

One thing that helped my oldest is IEW.  They do a Key Word Outline.  They pick 3 words from each sentence of a passage.  They write the words out, each sentence’s key words on it’s own line of paper, then they rewrite (or retell) the passage using just the outline.  It took away the blank page fear that was crippling my daughter’s writing abilities. That was her biggest issue—not knowing what to say.  This might also help your son with ordering and organizing his thoughts.  It doesn’t make for the most creative writing, but I think this method does have it’s place!

Well, I don’t know if it’s CM, but it does sound good to me. It’s a good goal to work up to.

When I started my oldest on longer written narrations, he was in 9th. I had him write 3 a week and my goal was to have him write 3-5 paragraphs, reaching a page long by the end of the year. It went way better than I thought, and he very quickly was able to do a page consistently. It depends on the topic, too – sometimes it’s easier to get to a page, and sometimes it’s harder – so my son ended up writing anywhere from 2 paragraphs to 2 pages. The length can vary, as long as it averages out to about the amount you want.