Curriculum spotlight: Writing with Ease

In the past I’ve written periodic reviews of the various materials we’re using in school, but this year we’re using so many that such a post would be way too long. Instead, I’m going to focus from time to time on a single subject and reflect on how the materials we’re using are working for us. Today the subject is third-grade writing.

I was delighted last summer when I discovered that Susan Wise Bauer has designed a writing program for the early grades. Her Story of the World series has made history a real joy around here, and the book she co-wrote with Jessie Wise, The Well-Trained Mind, has had an immeasurable impact on my whole educational philosophy.

There are two parts to this series: an overview, and a series of optional consumable workbooks for grades 1-4. The vision for teaching writing as laid out in these books makes a lot of sense to me. Written speech has different conventions than spoken speech, Bauer argues, and because of this immersion programs — those that proceed by handing students a pencil and encouraging them to journal and write creatively as much as possible — don’t really work the way they do when a child learns a (living) foreign language. Instead, she recommends following the classical methods used by composers and writers alike, who studied, memorized, and copied the great works of their predecessors.

I purchased the level 3 workbook so that choosing my own texts wouldn’t be a necessity. I can substitute whenever I want, but I don’t have to plan out a series of written models. The basic strategy is to incorporate summarizing and taking dictation in different ways over a four-day week. So far I am satisfied with the program, though a few things puzzle me about it. I’ll talk about them first.

In The Well-Trained Mind, Bauer and Wise argue for living books, rather than anthologies of excerpts. Choose real stories and have students re-tell them to you in their own words, rather than chopping out bits and pieces and asking students to answer questions about them. Yet Writing with Ease plainly does just this; each week offers short readings from larger works, and includes scripted questions for the parent to probe the student’s comprehension and guide her in identifying the main points.

Another aspect of the book I find bewildering — and which I should have seen coming — is how redundant it feels. We’ve been summarizing texts, writing narrations, and taking dictation since first grade. These are foundational practices in the classical approach, reinforced in history, reading, science, and in language as taught using First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind. If anything, this “writing program” represents a step back, because the student’s actual writing is less extensive than we’ve been practicing. (This is because the parent is instructed to transcribe the student’s narrations at this point in the school year.)

Aside from these puzzlements, however, I find that I’m valuing the workbook highly for an altogether different reason than its perfectly solid and acceptable writing instruction: it’s introducing us to new books. I know, I know — I just complained that it uses excerpts. But the excerpts are great. We’ve read “Jabberwocky” and undergone a brief introduction to the terminology of poetic craft. We’ve read bits and pieces of Robert Lawson, Robert McCloskey, and the Brothers Grimm. We’ve read pieces about colonial life and the Great Wall of China. Twice, we’ve had to make spur-of-the-moment library trips to find the larger works from which these excerpts are taken, and my third grader has finished them on her own time: Robert Lawson’s Mr. Revere and I, and Lloyd Alexander’s Time Cat. I peeked into future pages and found more juicy tidbits awaiting us. It’s been a wonderful surprise to discover that in addition to teaching writing, this program provides a pinch of new seasoning to our free-reading.

Other strong points include how well it meshes with the grammar we’re using (level 3 Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind), and how it proceeds in small bites. The lessons are not long and demanding, but short and managable. It’s also extremely easy to incorporate without much preparation on the teacher’s part, because the workbook has provided the texts and broken down the lessons into daily increments. This program amounts to a gentle introduction to the art of entering into a conversation with texts, repeating the process of transferring material from mind to paper daily and rehearsing the rhythms and conventions of written speech till they become habitual. In theory, it lays a foundation of “ease” for future writing. I can’t wait to see the results.