Writing in elementary school

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FCPS is not teaching writing.

Accept that and either teach them yourself or hire a tutor. Or do one of the weekly AoPS Language Arts class. Complaining will get you nowhere and your time will be better spent focusing on enriching your own child.

Hard truths.

Apparently some schools are.

Very few. Less than 10

Haha. You’ve counted?

[Anonymous]

You need to send your child to Catholic school if you want quality writing instruction. They've always been known for it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m a teacher. Our third graders have taken personal narratives, “all about books”, content area research, realistic fiction and poetry through the writing process. They planned, drafted, revised and edited their work. They met with peers and teachers in writing conferences. Their writing was graded using the FCPS rubrics. Our focus lessons have covered punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, etc.

this is that Lucy Calkins garbage. With her method she does not teach sentence structure, grammar, and spelling.

+1. There are no lessons and practice on each grammar component any longer. They just ask the kids to simply write a personal narrative, for example. They have not taught parts of speech, possession, apostrophes, rules, etc. Just slop some words down with no eye to run on sentence or diversifying sentence structure. Kids are expected to have intuition that a sentence needs a subject and predicate. It’s sad.

This may be school specific. I teach 2nd and have lessons from FCPS (in the pacing guide) on apostrophes, possession, etc.

+1
Third grade.

+1
I don't know where people are getting the idea that there is no grammar, formal aspects of writing taught in FCPS. It's been a part of every grade level of both of my kids' K-8th grade education in FCPS. It's in the FCPS curriculum and pacing guides and they consistently do exercises. I've volunteered at school (pre-pandemic) and I've seen them doing the exercises. There is also free writing where the emphasis is not on teaching grammar, but they have received plenty of formal writing instruction. I'm not sure where parents are getting the idea that it's not taught in FCPS.

bc it’s not being taught in a systematic way. You can’t just casually mention to a second grade class what contractions are (or worse yet, let Lexia introduce it to your child) and expect they will know how to do it without practice and without ever revisiting it for the rest of second grade. There is no systematic English grammar focus at our elementary school.

Not casually mentioned. Lessons, practice, writing to use it specifically. It happens.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’ve been really disappointed with my third graders writing. He isn’t capitalizing proper names, leaving spaces between words and not using punctuation. He teacher makes no corrections for these things. Shouldn’t she correct these mistakes do he learns the correct way to write? I’m very disappointed with the lack of writing instruction. He has never had any writing home or spelling words for all of third grade! Is this just me or are others having the same issues in FCPS?

It’s just you.

They aren’t going to be churning out serials like Dickens at this age.

There is no excuse for the teacher not to correct those mistakes. That is first grade stuff! They don’t need to be writing novels but sentence level mechanics should be better than that in third grade. My second grader at Catholic school had trouble with all that last year and it was always corrected. Now he is good other than misspelling tougher words like fascinating. We are coming back to FCPS for third because a younger sibling’s needs cannot be met in Catholic school and this kind of thing makes me nervous. I think math and science will be better in FCPS but I’m expecting language arts to be disappointing. I guess I will have to keep him progressing on these things at home. Ugh.

FCPS pacing guide for writing said something about how correcting errors can hurt their feelings. I am not kidding. During student teaching elsewhere we did mark errors in colorful pen. They didn’t use Calkins so they taught spelling, grammar, etc. Came to FCPS where they never had spelling tests and the gifted kids struggled with writing. I corrected errors in attempt to teach the correct way but was told numerous times to stop because it could hurt their feelings.

I am really not kidding. I lasted one year because it hurt my head. Many parents seemed to want things that were normal in the schools I had been in before, but admins and others above me just kept telling me no.

Lurking here, considering going back to teaching. Just want to do it somewhere with a more classical approach to ELA instruction. Anyway, don’t blame the teachers. Complain to those above them. Unless you’re very seasoned, you can’t really get away with just teaching whatever you want and however you want, even if we are talking about safe things like marking corrections or explicit writing instruction.

how can a parent view a pacing guide?

You’d probably have to request a copy from the principal or teacher.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m a teacher. Our third graders have taken personal narratives, “all about books”, content area research, realistic fiction and poetry through the writing process. They planned, drafted, revised and edited their work. They met with peers and teachers in writing conferences. Their writing was graded using the FCPS rubrics. Our focus lessons have covered punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, etc.

this is that Lucy Calkins garbage. With her method she does not teach sentence structure, grammar, and spelling.

+1. There are no lessons and practice on each grammar component any longer. They just ask the kids to simply write a personal narrative, for example. They have not taught parts of speech, possession, apostrophes, rules, etc. Just slop some words down with no eye to run on sentence or diversifying sentence structure. Kids are expected to have intuition that a sentence needs a subject and predicate. It’s sad.

This may be school specific. I teach 2nd and have lessons from FCPS (in the pacing guide) on apostrophes, possession, etc.

+1
Third grade.

+1
I don't know where people are getting the idea that there is no grammar, formal aspects of writing taught in FCPS. It's been a part of every grade level of both of my kids' K-8th grade education in FCPS. It's in the FCPS curriculum and pacing guides and they consistently do exercises. I've volunteered at school (pre-pandemic) and I've seen them doing the exercises. There is also free writing where the emphasis is not on teaching grammar, but they have received plenty of formal writing instruction. I'm not sure where parents are getting the idea that it's not taught in FCPS.

Because after you teach it once, it needs to be reinforced. And reinforced in a way that ties it all together and in which the teacher gives actual red ink back showing the mistakes. Not just attaching some dumb rubric circling the things that are wrong generally, but not specifically. That is not happening. It has never happened in our 10 years (so far) of FCPS.

[Anonymous]

My child is a wonderful writer. She has worked with me throughout her childhood on wiring in her diary, poems, essays, etc.

It’s really not impossible to teach your child to write. It only takes doing a small amount consistently.

Parent, the buck stops with you. Not the schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My child is a wonderful writer. She has worked with me throughout her childhood on wiring in her diary, poems, essays, etc.

It’s really not impossible to teach your child to write. It only takes doing a small amount consistently.

Parent, the buck stops with you. Not the schools.

Then why have schools?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You need to send your child to Catholic school if you want quality writing instruction. They've always been known for it.

+1 my first grade adhd boy educated in parochial has better grammar than what OP describes. my older kid was also writing clear and grammatically correct sentences in first. I would be appalled if this was happening in 3rd grade.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You need to send your child to Catholic school if you want quality writing instruction. They've always been known for it.

+1 my first grade adhd boy educated in parochial has better grammar than what OP describes. my older kid was also writing clear and grammatically correct sentences in first. I would be appalled if this was happening in 3rd grade.

So the buck stops with Catholic schools but not with FCPS schools...do I have it right?

[Anonymous]

Parents can rely on FCPS to keep their child fed, reasonably safe, and to learn basic math and literacy. Anything else is gravy and parents should plan to supplement.

[Anonymous]

During the pandemic I was shocked to learn my 11th grader, who was struggling to work on a large, complex paper, had never been taught to make an outline. FCPS is horrible about teaching fundamental writing skills.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You need to send your child to Catholic school if you want quality writing instruction. They've always been known for it.

+1 my first grade adhd boy educated in parochial has better grammar than what OP describes. my older kid was also writing clear and grammatically correct sentences in first. I would be appalled if this was happening in 3rd grade.

So the buck stops with Catholic schools but not with FCPS schools...do I have it right?

[Anonymous]

To be better writers, kids need to READ more. If you're not comfortable with or don't have time to reinforce writing instruction at home, at least make sure there is daily reading time to they see sentence structure, punctuation, capitalization, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:During the pandemic I was shocked to learn my 11th grader, who was struggling to work on a large, complex paper, had never been taught to make an outline. FCPS is horrible about teaching fundamental writing skills.

Not sure if this is true. Often teachers teach things and kids forget. This is common year to year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:During the pandemic I was shocked to learn my 11th grader, who was struggling to work on a large, complex paper, had never been taught to make an outline. FCPS is horrible about teaching fundamental writing skills.

Not sure if this is true. Often teachers teach things and kids forget. This is common year to year.

Completely true. I confirmed with older sibling who is FCPS graduate now in college. They had never seen anything like a structured outline before.