Journal writing for my reluctant student

My son's try at creative writing

I’ve a peculiar situation in my homeschool; I homeschool my nephew, who is in 3rd grade like my son.  My nephew has a few learning disorders, because of this, I have concentrated on learning to read and math, leaving writing and spelling for later.  It was easier to keep my 3 youngest students together in Language Arts, and helped my nephew to not feel dumb, as he did in school.  Now that his reading is more in hand, I see the need to let my son branch off and soar ahead in his writing and grammar.  Because of the consideration I gave my nephew, my 3 youngest have not done much writing.  They have done dictated narration to me, and short sentence assignment.  The time, finally was ripe to push them further.

I met with resistance. And laziness. And a bit of whining.

My solution is the creative writing journal.

I gave each child a blank composition notebook, and on day 1- gave them a writing prompt.

The first prompt: Write about who you are, what you like, what your favorite things are…

My son, Thing 1- took off with creative abandon when I told him I would not be correcting or reading them.  He finished a whole page and a half.

My youngest daughter age 7, resisted a bit, but finally finished half a page.

My nephew, Thing 2- sat with blank page.  I finally had him dictate to me, while I wrote down what he told me, and then he copied the sentences.  This is normal procedure for his work- and what I was trying to get beyond.  I was a little at a loss as what to do, and pretty discouraged.

My non-writing student tries creative writing

The next day, the prompt was, “write about a pet you would like to have, what you would name it, what kinds of things you would do with it…”

I had better effort from Thing 1 and The Youngest.  Thing 1 wrote 2 whole pages, The Youngest completed 1 whole page.

Thing 2 sat again with a blank page.  Finally I helped him, as before, with a sentence.  And then, again I told him I would not read it, just glance to see how much was done, and that I would not correct spelling or any mistakes- that he only had to sound out the words and do his best. I wrote down a few words he might want to use .  To my relief, this seemed to click with him, and he wrote 2 sentences all by himself.

this was huge. huge.

Creative journal writing can be a huge boost to a child’s writing ability.  It’s now a fixture in our homeschool.  If you have reluctant writers, this might be just the ticket to achieving longer writing assignments and to achieving writing confidence.