Operation Writing - Day 2

Today was another tough day for writing. I knew that it would be, but I am glad its over. The plan of attack I settled on was to force different types of writing but to not give in and make sure the required writing was complete each day. So far, we have completed each assignment, but each one took more than an hour.

Monday was a copywork assignment. After about an hour, I gave in and let CC choose the passage - my caveat was that it had to have several pronouns since that was the focus of our grammar lesson for the day - by the way I have a terrific way of teaching pronouns. :) CC finally finished the copywork. We talked about how I complete the passage quickly by keeping a whole phrase in my mind instead of copying word by word. She realized that she has trouble keeping the picture of a whole word in her head. I think I will count the copywork as a win - she did the work and learned something about her writing at the same time. Painful but complete.

Today's assignment was writing short answers for history questions. Ouch. If I thought Monday was painful, it was just the beginning. Today was worse. Eventually, she wrote her answers, and they were terrific. If I admitted that it took in excess of two hours to get three short answer paragraphs, would that be sad? It seems the main problem that she had besides being stubborn was that she had trouble shortening her answers into the space provided. She had a lot more detail to add than would fit into five or six lines on a page. I had worried that she would have trouble making good sentences or organizing her thoughts or something, but given a specific topic such as how Charles V came to rule so much land, she has even more to say than SWB put in SoTW.


Tomorrow, we will do a free write. She has already started thinking about what she wants to write. Maybe it will be better. I am hoping that once we get over the stubbornness and both understand what the writing issues are that it won't be so hard.