Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School Should I be worried about DS8's writing?

By writing, I am referring to stories, personal narratives, etc. that he's asked to do in school, not penmanship.

DS8 really struggles when given a topic to write about. I don't think he spends enough time crafting a well thought out intro paragraph -- whenever I ask him about writing he's brought home, or what the teacher asked for, he tells me he is supposed to have written 5 paragraphs. He seems really hung up on that number!

Sometimes he will have a pretty good intro paragraph, but then the paragraphs that follow have absolutely nothing to do with the introduction (more like free writing).

...But in 4th grade I know his teacher is looking for more structured, organized writing than what he's showing. I have a parent conference in a week and I know the subject of writing is going to come up.

He's never shown a tremendous amount of interest in writing, and generally dislikes the topics given to write about at school, but when we homeschooled I had a box of prompts for him to choose from each day, and he never complained (and his writing was better then, actually).

We've begun using Grammar Town a few times a week after school, but so far it doesn't involve much writing (maybe later it will).

Question is -- should I even be worried about writing at his age??

DD is in a 4th grade gifted program and was expected to write a research paper on one of the states, covering 12 topics like "history", "native americans", "climate", "landmarks", etc. The kids were expected to research via the internet, on their own, in class. DD had no idea what she was doing. She wrote about 1-2 sentences for half of the topics and said she was done.
Her sources at the end looked like this:
www.myteacher.com
www.google.com
www.theclassroomcomputer.com
www.myself.com
www.mymom.com

I intervened and helped her and she still got a B or C. She had about 4 pages, single spaced. It seems over the top for a 4th grader, gifted or not. I would love to know how much her classmates did.

I'm really not sure what is normal, but I did do a little test at home with her where I gave her a starter sentence and gave her a minute to think about the starter sentence and then 3 minutes to write. I think it was a CBM fluency test that I found online. I tried it a couple different times and she was writing about 20 words and it should be more like 40-50 for a fourth grader. I put in a request for a special ed eval to look at writing. We've also had private testing that showed big gaps in scores (with fluency being very low).

MON, I think you're right about the rules, and we can do that at home, but I honestly don't recall writing being that big a deal in elementary school.

We have so little time after school (he plays two instruments) that I really have to cherry pick what our after schooling looks like (and DS typically prefers that we spend that time on Beast Academy math and now Grammar Town which he's really taken to).

I don't want to come across to the teacher as having a total disregard for what they are pushing in terms of writing though (it was the same story in 3rd grade, too, different state, btw)--I just find it hard to believe that writing is such a huge deal at this stage of his education.

But, as my son recently told me, "Mom, you've been wrong before."

:-)

When you get to the conference, you might try clarifying with the teacher what the assignments really consist of, and what kind of instruction and scaffolding they receive in the classroom. Of course, expectations differ, but I would have found frequent, unscaffolded 5 para essays to be unrealistic for even GT 4th graders. OTOH, walking them through the process of composing a 5 para essay (say, one week for planning, and then one paragraph per week, over the course of a 6 week writing unit) would be more realistic.

blackcat - just saw your response.

When my son is moved to write - which isn't all that often - he writes fluently. He's very articulate, too, both verbally and on paper. But he doesn't organize his thoughts/sentences on paper the way he apparently is supposed to at this point.

I just don't think he understands why so much has to be written about one idea. I think it's the layers of detail he pushes back on the most. And his teacher this year definitely wants more detail, more "sensory" details as it says on his paper.

He's very much into science fiction fantasy, and I've seen him write quite a bit if left to his own devices to make up a story. But if given a topic in school and asked to write several paragraphs, it's like his brain shuts down.

Thanks aeh - will be sure to ask about writing process b/c I'm sure DS leaves out things that he doesn't think are important enough to share!

squishys - between 5 and 10 paragraphs?! Okay, I am pretty sure I wasn't writing that much so early. That's pretty outrageous.

Here in past years FL has had formal state level writing tests in 4th, 8th and 10th grades. You had to pass 10th grade to graduate or keep taking it until you do. Fourth grade test was a Very Big Deal in the eyes of the school (but doesn't hold you back or anything if you don't pass). So the kids start a prescribed writing program (in addition to a more developmental approach that they use when they write in journals) and the strict program begins in 1st grade and gradually gets more and more intense to 4th grade. So I certainly can believe the expectation of a 5 paragraph essay in 4th. In my son's class last year they had to include anecdotes, examples, transitions from paragraph to paragraph, etc. He came home from school with such gems as "said is dead". The writing (when posted class assignments) and I read it over looks so formulaic, forced, and fake. And the prompts are stupid.

This year they have restructured the entire testing so I don't know what they are doing.

I have the same problem with ds7. The odd thing is I found the national standard exemplars on line (we are in.NZ) and they are much more appropriate. It seems the teachers are trying to make things more advanced for some reason. I would rather they just worked on single topic paragraphs until they were comfortable then took it from there. I can see no reason why.a 7 year old should have to write 2 pages with references.