I need a little advice . . . I have put my 5yr old DS through Handwriting without Tears and he now writes quite nicely. I'm just having problems trying to work out the next step to get him to writing a story etc - I'm stuck! Sure I can get him to copy down lists of words but what is the process to get him to start writing sentences, like "I had a dream that I could fly". He can tell me a story or repeat a dream he had but he doesn't know how to spell enough words to put it on paper. Do I write the story in a simple way and then get him to copy it?? If I can find the right way to do this then I think it will also help his handwriting as he'll be able to practice more. I have printed out some sheets on ABCteach but now I'm out of ideas. Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated.
If he can he read Write down several words on strips of paper or make a 4x20 table in a Word Processor--dont forget the punctuation marks! You should draw those with a felt marker so they can be clearly seen and identified. Cut the word paper up and help him put them into piles by alphebetical order. Let him arrange the words in order to make a sentence, a paragraph, a story. Have him copy it. Look at a list of sight words and then add in several keywords like: dream, horse, castles, power rangers, whatever it is he might need. Dont leave out real life wordslike "be quiet, yelled, gross, stupid" whatever he might need, make sure he gets it. Have him write a few stories by arranging words and then copy them down via his notebook or whatever. Soon he should begin writing on his own without the use of as many tiles. Accept misspellings and just take note of them. If he cant read, I recommend TRL, its been working well for 6yo. We've been with it for 2 months and he reads fairly well now. Also, look into the Scholastic Grade One Grammar book, its really good. As soon as 6yo finishes TRL, we're going to begin working in this book and I'm going to work on spelling. PS. I know the review avg. isn't that good, but thats because one person gave it 1 star because their not supposed to copy the pages. The other 2 reviewers gave it a 4 and 3 star review because it is a good review/reinforcement workbook.
Yes he can read (Reading Eggs), things like: Dan has a cat in a hat Sid the kid can see the rat . . . etc Thanks
Once my boys could write their letters well, the first thing I did was to have them do copywork, they could choose what they wanted to copy each day and we started with one sentence and gradually moved up to a paragraph. Now that they can both do that well, I have moved on to writing. While they were doing copywork we studied how to write sentences (first letter capital, punctuation at the end, using subject and predicate), and now they will write sentences. We still haven't gotten to the point of creative writing just yet, but we're working on it. Another helpful activity is to show your son an object and ask him to write down words that describe that object (show him a box for example and he could describe it as: Square, brown, fillable, open/closed, sealed, flat, cube)
Birbitt! Thats a WONDERFUL idea. I've been puzzling over how to transition into writing and such! I have a grammar book for 6yo that I think is just great, and doing copywork while working in that book to understand the grammar of the languagec sounds like a great idea! Thanks!
No problem, now if I can just get the two of them to actually do creative writing I'll be one happy mama! It seems this was all much easier when they were littler but now that they are a bit older I feel more compelled to make sure they are doing more than just math and phonics. So, we work on whatever I come up with that I think they need to know.
Have him draw a picture and then tell you a sentence about the picture. Don't write his words down, but draw a line for each word. Then encourage him to sound out. What sound is at the beginning? Are there any in the middle? What sound is at the end? Don't correct him! Let him use "inventive" spelling at first to simply get the feel for writing sentences. I know, it seems like you're teaching him incorrectly with this method, but at this point it's about recognizing sounds. You can create a word wall of sorts with common words like "the" "and" "cat" etc. Keep reading with him and having him find words that he knows.
Thanks for your wonderful replies. Did any of you use printable worksheets from the net that you used for the copy work etc???
