Teaching Writing by Writing

This year I decided to take a more low key approach and not have a curriculum for each and every subject I hoped they'd make progress in. Composition books have been the work horse for this year's school with the exception of math. My favorite innovation that has come from that is our History essays. Previously we'd used the questions that come in the activity book to review and we ended up eating a lot of M&Ms that way. This year the more writing I could get them to do, the happier I would be, so I started by having them write a summary as soon as I finished reading the daily section from our history book. (We use the Story of the World series and I highly recommend it.) This resulted in spotty essays that usually only involved the last third of our reading. I changed tactics and stopped periodically in the reading and required them to write a sentence. The result was much improved comprehension, sentence structure and paragraphs. Our third has even begun to push herself to write a full page every day. I then check the work and have them make corrections. Writing skills are improving, while the exciting subjects--history and science inspire them and are more thoroughly remembered. I have even seen them consult their books in order to remember some part of history they were thinking over. They have two other composition books. One is for summarizing their daily reading. As the history ideas unfolded, they began to apply what they learned there to this book as well. Taking notes as they read has become common. Science is our other notebook and we use to record our experiments the way professional labs do. We haven't done as many experiments as I'd hoped, but I can see that getting better with time. This has been a very positive change in our writing program. I will probably go back to reviewing the rules of grammar, but for everything else, these real essays are doing a better job.