Reply to my sixth grader has not learned to write in MCPS

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "my sixth grader has not learned to write in MCPS"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]First of all, where are you seeing all these writing assignments?

Second, might this be school-dependent?

My son went to a Bethesda-area elementary which implemented the Lucy Calkin (sp?) writing program and had a LOT of essay writing in 4th and 5th, which was great practice. But now in middle school as a 6th grader, I haven't seen any piece of writing come home, and the only writing I see him preparing are completely inane "literature profile" questions which seem very basic. And that's in the supposedly Advanced English class!

Very weird.

To answer your question, OP, I think you might want to coach her yourself for while. Explain the basics of doing a little list or diagram (depending on whether she's more text or pict-oriented) while brainstorming ideas, checking the rubric to hit all the points, and then writing each paragraph with the thematic sentence first and simply stated. Lastly, crafting the intro and conclusion - although she could do a simple chronological order, but kids often find the intro and conclusion to be a little challenging. 
Lastly she needs to practice doing it with a time constraint. You set a timer and she needs to write something in 15-20 minutes on a set question.

Basically there's a recipe she needs to follow. What I impressed on my son is that it's not necessarily good writing, but it's what MCPS wants to see. BIG difference. Until he understood that, he was forever getting poor grades... you really need to dumb it down in this public school system, and not be too creative at all.[/quote]

The last paragraph should be mailed to our new superintendent, who seems to think every kid whose parents are college-educated will be fine. [/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