Tristan, Are you still using WriteShop?? Anyone else?

I’m not! It was pretty teacher intensive and I was using two different levels in with 3 kids (all under age 12). Here are my convoluted thoughts on it all:

1. I liked the younger kid level (Level A) because there are fun activities and we did the writing as copywork, so they told me the story they wanted and I wrote it on dry erase boards. Then they copied it. However, these started out generally as a ‘format’ of a few lines with specific beginnings and so they were limited in creativity. I see a huge difference between that and simply allowing them to do oral narration without the limits of the Write Shop format. They have so much more creativity when narrating about things of their choice/related to their readings. The other drawback with this age group was I had to sit with them for the entire lesson every day while little ones ran amuck. So we dumped Write Shop and went to our CM roots – oral narration and copywork. I try to give them 1 ‘writing tip’ every so often (these are currently 1st and 2nd grade kids) like begin a sentence with a capital letter or always us punctuation at the end. That’s it!

2. I had Makayla doing level D at age 10 (she had decided writing was worse than math last year). Pros: She liked the games and fun activities. Cons: She still had to write in the end, this just dragged out the whole process, and it took even more of my time. In the end she started digging in her heels when we pulled it out because she now had writing assignment parts every day pretty much.

One nice thing with the Write Shop for her was that it has different units that we could pick up and do to learn about a new genre, then take a break. She hated the Humor writing piece, but enjoyed the Science Fiction piece.

In the end, we went back to CM for Makayla too. She went back to oral narration and written narration, some copywork. Much better fit. She is 11 and 6th grade now, does written narrations on notebooking pages with minimal fuss and lots of detail, and ASKED to being prepared dictation with Spelling Wisdom. I’m seeing the wisdom of just following Charlotte’s principles for language arts generally.

With that said, if I only had 1-3 kids I could find the time to do Write Shop if it was something they enjoyed. I just happen to have seven going on eight, one with special needs/medical needs. Group lessons and learning independence are important for our family! This week, for example, I was gone with Mason at 3 hours of medical appointments Monday morning (our main homeschool hours) and for 4.5 hours Tuesday morning for different medical appointments for Mason. Monday Daddy did the homeschooling, Tuesday Grandma oversaw things. Thankfully the kids have learned some major independence to make it possible. If we were using a lot of curricula like Write Shop with daily lessons Mommy had to do one on one things would not have been done.

To each their own!