Reply to Should a 7-year-old be able to write a five-paragraph essay?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My DS is in 2nd grade at a well-regarded DCPS school. He’s doing fine overall, but when I asked him to write about what he did last weekend, he gave me six short sentences with almost no detail. I tried to walk him through writing an intro and some supporting ideas, and he got frustrated and said, “I don’t want to do paragraphs.”
I know writing develops at different speeds, but [b]is it unreasonable to expect basic essay structure by this age?[/b] I’m not pushing for college-level writing, but I don’t want him to fall behind either. Do teachers focus more on structure later?[/quote]

It's not reasonable at that age. Children learn how to structure writing by reading examples of well-structured writing, and then being asked to replicate it after lots and lots and lots of exposure to the form. If you want him to be accelerated in language arts, (which is totally fine and no worse than all the parents who do super advanced math enrichment at this age) then start by showing him a good 5-paragraph essay example every day, and talk together to analyze the different parts of the essay. Your current approach is putting the cart before the horse and making him hate writing.[/quote]

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