2nd Grade Journaling

It has been interesting to see the work that was sent home for the boys while they had the chicken pox. Most of it was pretty standard stuff, Ben had lots of Math pages, Fox a mixture of subjects, and most of Ethan’s assignments required writing. His teacher sent home a regular ruled single subject notebook that said “We write 30 minutes per day story or personal narrative.” Ok, seems reasonable (although my mother, the retired teacher, thought 30 minutes was sort of long for a 2nd grader), so I flip through the pages to see what Ethan had done so far and was shocked. It was just one long row of letters, no spaces, mostly written in capitals, no punctuation at all. All of his entries were this way.First off, we had talked about how to begin sentences and end sentences. We also worked with Handwriting Without Tears and I’ve constantly reminded him to use his lower case letters. We had even journaled at home using the Starfall notebooks. But all of that seemed to fly right out the window when he went in the classroom. This is part of why he was so discouraged. It felt like an overwhelming task to work in this fashion. I understand this teacher is cruising into the last part of the year and doesn’t really feel like going back and starting from the beginning with a student, but to let the kid continue to work incorrectly sort of irks me. I mean at least write his ideas out correctly and let him recopy the entry so he knows what it should look like; something to help him improve. Seriously, how much time would that have taken her-about a minute?

So that’s what we did at home. First he complained he didn’t know what to write so I dictated a couple short personal stories and reminded him about capitals at the beginning of sentences, when to put in a ‘spacer,’ and how to punctuate the ending. He followed instructions and did just fine. Then we moved on to him telling me his story, me writing it on a different piece of paper so he could see how it should be formatted and he wrote it out on his own. And lastly, he was on his own to compose and write but I made myself available to help with spelling when needed. I asked if he had any type of word list at school to work with if he needed to know how to spell something and he said he did. I am having him continue to journal during the break week for ‘extra credit.’ Hopefully he will be able to keep working at this level when he returns to the classroom next week. The more material we got through the more improvement I noticed in his handwriting and made sure to compliment him about it. He seemed to be taking more pride in his work too.Working with them on homework has been much less of a hassle than working on our homeschool assignments. It is amazing the difference now that they have seen what other kids their age are accomplishing and they strive to be at that level as well. There is definately something to be said for healthy competition.