writing station

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Permalink Reply by Merry on March 2, 2010 at 12:30am

How old is she? What else is she doing for LA outside of AAS? Dictation and the Writing Station might be enough depending on what else she does.

My 5th grade dd has done handwriting, a Language Arts Workbook (some sentence writing, not overly much), some journalling (not corrected), and some occasional writing for other subjects (a paragraph or two, not corrected).

Here's how we handle the writing station:

1, After they write, I take some time to praise their ideas and creativity.

2, Then I ask them to edit for spelling and see what they can find. I praise for any and all that they can find.

3, If there are errors that are words they have studied in AAS, or follow patterns from AAS, that they didn't find, then I either point those out or let them know which line to look for an error in. (If they are getting tired or frustrated, I would just point it out & see if they know how to fix it). Have her read all of the sounds if she is leaving sounds out of any words--that's a good way to help her find errors. Also, reading a sentence from the end back to the beginning is a good way to help them read what they actually wrote--instead of what they think they wrote.

4, I do correct for grammar in these. I find that some of the lessons do tend to create more errors than others. If my kids are trying to put all of the words into one story/paragraph, sometimes the endings don't seem to go together (or could but would take a different verb form to make it work, things like that). I talk through these & help with this. If she's frustrated by doing all of that in one day, I would break the lesson into two days--one day correct spelling, one day look at grammar and punctuation. For us, all of this usually takes 5 minutes, so not too tough.

If my kids misspell words that we haven't studied, I often ignore them. The exception is if the word is something very common that I think they need to learn. In that case I add it to a blank word card & put it in their review box.

I hope this helps some. Oh, here's a blog entry on help with writing that may give you more ideas on how to help spelling skills get used in her writing.

Merry :-)

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