Hello!
I'm wondering if anyone has done extra-curricular writing work with their child, and in what format.
Background: my son enjoys writing, and gets excellent grades in his Language Arts classes. This is not bragging--I don't think the standards are unbelievably high :-) We are fortunate to be in a great school district, and have a wonderful LA teacher this year, but nonetheless the class size is about 25, and the teacher has 4 LA classes, so that means a lot of papers to grade per assignment. One thing that I see happen in our public school, given the workload, is probably fewer writing assignments than what would be ideal.
But the killer to me is that I see grades/scores come back on papers, but very little personal feedback on the papers themselves. Personally, I would love to see the papers come back in a sea of red....no matter how far above grade-level your writing might be, there is always room for improvement. He might write well, but definitely not perfectly! There are some awkward sentences, not-as-powerful-as-they-could-be sentences, occasional parts that may not logically flow from one to the other, etc. There are times when there could be better word choice, etc. So even if he deserves a 100% when scored against the district rubric, I would like him to get some serious improvement feedback.
Now, despite this awkwardly written post :-) I am actually a decent writer myself. So one option, of course, would be for ME to just take a copy of his school work, and edit it, and point things out. But for some reason I am unbelievably lazy about this. I'm motivated about doing science projects and other things, but despite good intentions, the truth is that I don't get around to this.
I'm wondering if anyone else finds the writing feedback to be lacking in your schools, and if so, do you:
* step in yourself to help (not so lazy!)
* use a writing tutor
* send your child to a writing camp
* give them extra writing assignments at home (that might be either truly "school-like" or more natural, like writing letters to Grandma that really describe a vacation, etc)
* encourage them to participate in writing competitions
* other??
Anyway, I'm just curious, because I think I'm dropping the ball on this one. So any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks!
