Monday, November 10, 2014

Raising Writers

My post on Raising Children Who Love to Write went up at home/school/life today. I had difficulty focusing that piece enough for a blog post. When it comes to the subject writing, I guess I can write and write and write!

The fun part in preparing that piece was going back to look at my notes on what the kids were doing over the years. I'm sharing some of those journal entries here.

Journal entries on writing…(ages added)

Middle Munchkin (age 3) started drawing stick people this week. These people have circle heads with stick bodies. Her drawings of people looked like balloons blowing in the wind, but the balloons had eyes, noses, and big smiles. She assured me they were people.

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Munchkin #1 (age 4) tells me stories and I type them. I break the story into scenes and print the pages for her, with room for illustrations. We read the sentences together and she draws the pictures.

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Munchkin Boy (age 6) says he doesn’t need to know how to write anything but his name. At this point, that’s the letter, K. “What if you need to write something else, like a grocery list?” I asked. He said I could write it for him.

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Middle Munchkin (age 8) started writing a new Harry Potter story this week. She says she can barely read her handwriting from the one that she was working on last year.

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Munchkin #1 (age 10) is still working on her story. She hasn’t asked me to read it in quite some time. Middle Munchkin, however, has been reading it and she loves it. In the car the other day, she said to Munckin #1, “It makes me feel like I’m watching it. It’s really good. I love it.”

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We had a conversation about using spellcheck on the computer. Munchkin #1 (age 10) asked if I thought it was okay for her to use spellcheck to correct her work. I said, “Absolutely, it’s a tool and you should learn to use it!” Then she told me she did use it, but it felt a bit like cheating. I find it interesting that she uses a word that I so strongly associate with school and school work. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about cheating before, though I suppose she’s come across the idea in other places, television and conversations with friends.

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Munchkin Boy's handwriting (age 11) is not neat, but his spelling is superb and he can get his point across. When he types, I would say his composition is well beyond his years. He’s slack on things like capitalization and punctuation. He says taking the time to capitalize slows him down too much.
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 Munchkin Boy (age 12) won first place in the 2013 Kansas Book Festival Contest. He entered an essay about Kansas stereotypes. His entry was titled, "Why do people think Kansas is flat in the first place?" It’s hard to admit that he’s getting paid more for writing than I am!

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Middle Munchkin (age 13) continues her obsession with learning to write with her left hand. I can hardly tell the difference now if she writes with the left or the right. She sometimes practices mirror writing, as well -- both hands writing at the same time in opposite directions!

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Munchkin #1 (age 15) is keeping a journal. She doesn’t share it with me, but I know that she is writing in it pretty much daily. She says this is one of the things she most enjoys about our current routine. Together we have been working on the mechanics of writing. Most of the time, this is me providing paragraphs of text that she edits. Sometimes we use worksheets we find online, but I enjoy creating my own. She does very well at this. She will usually pick out every single error, from punctuation to spelling.

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I found out yesterday that Middle Munchkin (age 15) signed up for one of those Coursera courses. For a couple of weeks now she has been taking a beginning college composition class. I had no idea. I don’t know how I missed it. When I asked her about it, she said, “You sent us that link and said there might be some stuff there we’d be interested in. I really want to learn to write well, so I signed up for it.”

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Munchkin #1 (age 18) asked me to review a paper she had written for her honors composition class this morning. It was a last-minute request for a quick review before she submitted the piece to her instructor. I found one misspelled word (a word spelled correctly, but not the word she was going for). I suggested she rein in her frequent use of semicolons. “I know,” she said. “I just really love semicolons.”


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