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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Also, they do writers workshop which I agree is absolutely ridiculous. But, for my kid, it really got him comfortable writing and he is very willing to write cards and letters because he practices writing every day (Even when he couldn't write out a single word and still struggled forming letters)[/quote]
Writer's workshop made my kid recalcitrant to any writing.  She's finally started being willing to write this year when the upper grade curriculum introduced scaffolding.  [/quote]

What types of scaffolding did the upper grades use?  And when you say upper, do you mean 2nd and 3rd or 7th and 8th?  When I taught first grade, I used the scaffold of providing possible opening sentences, closing sentences, and we did a lot of work on writing details and supporting sentences.  Most of my students could write very strong paragraphs.  I think different people use the term writer's workshop to mean different things.  In my writer's workshop, I did about 20% whole group instruction, 50% small group instruction and then about 30% of the time I co-taught or had other teachers in the room to work with kids individually on the exact skills they needed to move forward.  I suspect that writer's workshop isn't the problem...it's how it is implemented.  I'm a little OCD about my students' progress and every weekend I spend several hours looking at kids' work and figuring out exactly what they need the following week to keep growing.[/quote]
We've seen a huge turn about this year in third grade writing.  The teacher told me it's because she's doing more scaffolding that was part of Lucy Caulkins.  I don't know most of it as I'm not in the classroom, but I've heard talk of an adjective wall and seen note cards with ideas and topic sentences.

In 2nd grade (by Teams) the kids were just given topics and asked to fill a page.  The teacher would give her own example or two, but the writing was assigned as a single step.  This didn't work for my child, though I'm sure many can do it.  She'd end the hour long writing class with a blank page every day and burst into tears if you asked her to keep working on it.

From my experience trying to help, she does better if you ask her first to identify a setting, then a problem, then to talk through what would happen first, then second, etc.  When she has most of the bits, then she'll be able to put it together.  But she needs those steps to help her.

She basically wrote nothing in K-2.  We even showed at her 1st grade conference and the teacher was shocked to open her writing folder and find it blank.  She'd sat quietly without writing a word from the beginning of school until late February without the teacher noticing.  This is a huge issue for a kid who is many grades ahead in both reading and math.  I think she wants to write like the author of a middle grade novel but doesn't know how, so you get nothing.[/quote]

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