Hey Amy from WT...I have a question

[Hot Lava Mama]

My ds 8 has been doing WT1 and it is such a huge improvement from Writing Strands. He has really drastically improved in his narration ability. I see it both in his WT work as well as his history narrations and other book narrations. Here's our problem. He can write a great first draft (which we then fix the errors at another lesson), but when it comes to the point where he has to add "creative touches" he really struggles with that. He doesn't enjoy writing, so when he asked if he could "just copy the same thing over and be done", I knew I better figure it out. He doesn't know how to be creative with regard to the story. Usually, I tell him to change two things. So he may make one of the animals have blue hair, and one have red hair. That is the extent of his "changes". What should we do? Is it sufficient that we do a draft that follows the story and then fix the errors and move on to the next story? Or, is the creative touch aspect important for the work he will be doing in later books? I am struggling with what to do at this point. Your help is appreciated!

Hot Lava Mama
:confused:

[Amy from WT]

Hi Hot Lava,

It sounds like his writing is really coming along; I'm so glad! And the reason I point that out is this - that really is the point of the whole program! The whole reason that I added the "creative touches" part was mainly to give the students some ownership in their final story.

When I intially ran my first try at "Writing Tales" with a writing class, each week I had the class re-write a fable, and then we moved on to another fable the next week. Well, I discovered two problems with that approach. First of all, it didn't give us enough time to do adequate analysis with the original story or editing of their re-written stories. We fixed that by adding on an extra week for each story. And the second problem? The students were completely unenthused by simply re-writing somebody else's story week after week. It wasn't THEIRS. So I allowed them to add their own "creative touches" to the story, as long as the basic story remained the same. And wowza, what a difference. All of a sudden I had a classful of kids that loved writing.

Now, they were all just a little bit different in the way that they approached this. For example, in a co-op class just today, we looked at final drafts of "The Boy and the Nuts" from WT 2. One boy kept the original story almost entirely, but to make it a little bit different, he added an enthusiastic line about how much the boy LOVED nuts, and gave me a list of ALL the different nuts that this boy loved. That was it. And what I loved about that story was the look on his face when I read it to the class. Was he ever proud of his list of nuts. And really, it was extensive.

Then take another story from today. One boy took HIS story of "The Boy and the Nuts" and turned it into "The Sick Grandmother and the Bottle of Pills." My goodness, was that creative! Yes, the basic story was the same - the grandmother learned not to be greedy and to take her pills (they were health store pills, btw, nothing illegal or addictive!!) out of the bottle one at a time -but that boy turned "The Boy and the Nuts" fable into his very own fable that had truly never been written, well, never even been CONCEIVED before!!

I'm tired from a long day and I'm rambling, but I really am trying to get to a point here. My point simply is this: the whole creative touch aspect is put into the program at this point mainly to give the students some sort of ownership of their story and some enjoyment of the writing process. If it is NOT doing that for your son, please don't stress over it. The most important goal is to make him a good writer, and if that is happening already, then you are doing just fine.

HTH, Blessings,