Writing in elementary school

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is not a Covid thing. This is a normal FCPS curriculum thing. They don’t really care about writing until high school and by then you’re kid kind of sucks at it. This is what private schools do better.

If you want your kid to write better, you really have to work on it at home. My kid is too busy working on google slides at school. Haven’t you noticed they don’t even do book reports anymore? When I was a student at fcps, I had to do a book report every month.

DP. It is definitely related to covid. I have older kids too and they didn't write like this in 3rd grade.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is not a Covid thing. This is a normal FCPS curriculum thing. They don’t really care about writing until high school and by then you’re kid kind of sucks at it. This is what private schools do better.

If you want your kid to write better, you really have to work on it at home. My kid is too busy working on google slides at school. Haven’t you noticed they don’t even do book reports anymore? When I was a student at fcps, I had to do a book report every month.

DP. It is definitely related to covid. I have older kids too and they didn't write like this in 3rd grade.

Could I be that your younger students is just not as strong in that area? And needs more help? Why do parents always compare their kids to each other?

[Anonymous]

I teach 8th grade English. We are still working on capitalization and punctuation at this age, no joke.

[Anonymous]

FCPS is terrible at developing early writing skills. We moved out of the area and my upper elementary student was shocked to find all of the new classmates writing two-page essays in sixth grade history and English class. No more fill-in-the-black worksheets like back in FCPS. Students by fourth grade were expected to be able to write a full page on any topic. It was an uphill slog for awhile to catch up to these new peers. Painful to watch. And we're in a place NOVA would scoff at as being "redneck" or "uneducated".

It's FCPS.

[Anonymous]

^No more fill-in-the-blank

Autocorrect...

[Anonymous]

Same here… the writing is horrendous. I have. Been thinking that we need outside help, some one to correct and teach how to write. Any recommendations for an outside class to help with an upper elementary child with writing?

[Anonymous]

My fourth grader has still been doing everything this year in "digital notebooks". Almost nothing written by hand or coming home on paper. Her handwriting and writing is completely awful.

[Anonymous]

We have a fourth grader and it seems that this year the Teacher is starting to actually teach how to write. They have been discussing how to approach different parts of a paragraph and how to generate ideas, what types of words they can use to make a sentence more interesting. I have noticed a real improvement in DS ability to write and quality of what he is writing. There still is not as much emphasis on punctuation, capitalization, and spelling as I would like. I asked the Teacher about that in a conference and she said that writing is really complicated and that it is over whelming for kids to be focused on everything. Her focus is on developing thoughts and the complexity of those thoughts and when kids are comfortable with that tackle more of the process errors. I do see papers coming home with punctuation corrections and capitalization corrections. We are handling spelling corrections at home. We ask Ds if he can spell a word, he spells it correctly and we remind him he needs to do that when he is writing. Or proof read his writing and correct mistakes that he finds.

It does seem like writing is improving. The impression I have gotten from all of my sons Teachers is that they are just trying to get the kids writing with confidence first and then correct the grammar and spelling mistakes. They don't want the kids to get so worried about making those mistakes that they don't write at all.

[Anonymous]

FCPS is the reason there's so many elementary tutoring places around here that charge exorbitant amounts of money.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is not a Covid thing. This is a normal FCPS curriculum thing. They don’t really care about writing until high school and by then you’re kid kind of sucks at it. This is what private schools do better.

If you want your kid to write better, you really have to work on it at home. My kid is too busy working on google slides at school. Haven’t you noticed they don’t even do book reports anymore? When I was a student at fcps, I had to do a book report every month.

DP. It is definitely related to covid. I have older kids too and they didn't write like this in 3rd grade.

Anyone with an 8th grader or below knows that FCPS basically eliminated writing after the state took away the required SOL writing tests.

[Anonymous]

All you test haters. Well you got what you asked for.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:All you test haters. Well you got what you asked for.

Crazy for people to think that you should be able to teach subjects without requiring a SOL or VGA or whatever other ridiculous assessment you want to hoist onto the kids. Some how many of us who went to school before No Child Left Behind did well without all the tests.

[Anonymous]

Not Covid. FCPS. My child's third-grade teacher gave DC 4s on pieces of writing that were, no joke, written in bright green large font, highlighted in various colors. Writing itself was an essay that was essentially one gigantic paragraph. This is in AAP. Fortunately, things improved on their own accord ... current teacher (fifth) doesn't allow stuff like that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have a fourth grader and it seems that this year the Teacher is starting to actually teach how to write. They have been discussing how to approach different parts of a paragraph and how to generate ideas, what types of words they can use to make a sentence more interesting. I have noticed a real improvement in DS ability to write and quality of what he is writing. There still is not as much emphasis on punctuation, capitalization, and spelling as I would like. I asked the Teacher about that in a conference and she said that writing is really complicated and that it is over whelming for kids to be focused on everything. Her focus is on developing thoughts and the complexity of those thoughts and when kids are comfortable with that tackle more of the process errors. I do see papers coming home with punctuation corrections and capitalization corrections. We are handling spelling corrections at home. We ask Ds if he can spell a word, he spells it correctly and we remind him he needs to do that when he is writing. Or proof read his writing and correct mistakes that he finds.

It does seem like writing is improving. The impression I have gotten from all of my sons Teachers is that they are just trying to get the kids writing with confidence first and then correct the grammar and spelling mistakes. They don't want the kids to get so worried about making those mistakes that they don't write at all.

This approach makes no sense to me. Why wouldn’t teachers want to work on things like capitalization, spacing, and punctuation while kids are still writing very simple sentences? Solidify the skills at the sentence level so that these things are automatic, then start working on putting ideas together at the paragraph and whole paper level. It is very hard to assess longer papers when sentence level writing is a mess. If you get bogged down in editing sentences you can’t evaluate the ideas and organization because the writing is too hard to read. I don’t necessarily blame the fourth grade teacher but this just seems like a failure of the first through third grade teaching approach.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is not a Covid thing. This is a normal FCPS curriculum thing. They don’t really care about writing until high school and by then you’re kid kind of sucks at it. This is what private schools do better.

If you want your kid to write better, you really have to work on it at home. My kid is too busy working on google slides at school. Haven’t you noticed they don’t even do book reports anymore? When I was a student at fcps, I had to do a book report every month.

DP. It is definitely related to covid. I have older kids too and they didn't write like this in 3rd grade.

Anyone with an 8th grader or below knows that FCPS basically eliminated writing after the state took away the required SOL writing tests.

Oh, okay. At least 18 months of no handwriting had no impact on the current group of 3rd grader's handwriting.

I'm not complaining about mechanics, I think that the "progressive" writing curriculums are problematic, I'm complaining that my kid cannot write. With a pencil. And he could in 1st grade.