Reply to feeling desperate - child struggling with new curriculum 2.0 in MCPS

Forum Index » Kids With Special Needs and Disabilities

Reply to "feeling desperate - child struggling with new curriculum 2.0 in MCPS"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]OP, I am an elementary school teacher and also a private tutor for kids having trouble with reading and writing (although I am not looking for new students right now).

There's an exceptionally good remedial writing curriculum I have recently found and begun using.   It is called "Pattern Based Writing".

http://patternbasedwriting.com/

The first five patterns are very simple to teach and easy for kids to understand.  The early assignments have kids mostly copying sentences, but filling in their own details.  By doing this, the students develop writing stamina and get practice holding just a few ideas in their memory while they mentally rewrite a sentence so it makes sense.

For example, the first two sentences might be:

1.  I know I'm sick when  ________________________________,  _______________________________________, and __________________________________.

2.  ________________, ___________________ and ____________________________ are three ways I know I am sick.

While the above exercises may seem boring and uncreative, they are exactly the kind of basic practice many kids need.  I have seen my poor writers improve dramatically after just copying into a notebook about three worksheet pages full of these types of sentences.   Having a sentence with just three blanks seems to help them not get stuck when trying to generate ideas.  After kids complete 3 pages of 30 sentences each, generating three details on each topic, they find it much easier to generate ideas on different topics of their own choosing.

Pattern 2 has the students take sentences with three details and turn them into a more generic topic sentence.  For example, they turn this sentence:

1.   After school, I have a snack, ride my bike, and watch some tv.

into this one:

1.  After school I do several relaxing activities.

There are again several pages of this type of activity -- take a sentence with three details and turn it into a more general topic sentence.   It seems rudimentary, but again, the child has to be a little creative (but not a lot) while writing a sentence on a piece of paper, copying many of the words (but not all of them) from a model.  This provides just the right amount of scaffolding poor writers need, I believe.

Patterns 3 and 4 have children practice more generalizing and giving details on a topic, and by pattern 5 they are putting everything together to write a 5 sentence paragraph with topic sentence, 3 supporting details, and a concluding sentence.

Again, I realize that this system of writing may sound overly formulaic, but I have found that kids who see themselves as poor writers first really benefit from frequent practice with this type of structure.  I don't think kids get enough basic composition instruction in school.  Many need the extra practice.   I have just used this system with 5 individual students (including my own 4th grader) since I learned about it a few months ago, but already I am seeing a great deal of improvement in my students' writing fluency and ability to generate ideas (and not get stuck).

If you are interested the curriculum can be downloaded from the above website.    I can't remember how much it cost == maybe in the $30 range?  WELL worth it.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics