Writing Workshop Meets Homeschool, Part 2

(This post is part two of two. The first one is here.)

In my previous post I explained why I love writing workshop and why I chose it to use in homeschool with my fourth grader this year. This post is about the challenges I have felt in trying to teach writing to my own child, as well as the challenges he has had as a learner, and how we adapted to make it work.

We've Had Some Challenges...

I had an image that he would take off in writing this year with consistent teaching. But despite the best practices embedded in writing workshop, writing time could feel pretty challenging-- for us both.

The sheer newness of it all was at times debilitating to him. He was not accustomed to a lot of work in writing so anything I asked him to do felt new and daunting. He is also really sensitive to the idea of being wrong. No matter how gently I tried to word things in the beginning-- telling him to just try his best, not to worry if it wasn't perfect-- he felt overwhelmed and just couldn't even try. There was whining and more. In the first week of our homeschool year, W told me more than once during writing time, "This is outrageous! I've never had to do this before!" We unfortunately had our moments of debating what he was or was not capable of, or what was or wasn't reasonable for a kid his age to work on. I tried to be patient but I failed sometimes.

Thinking

Overwhelmed

Distraction. There were so many distractions, some purposeful and some not. He tried to avoid the mental effort that writing, especially, felt like to him. We'd finally get settled to start and he suddenly needed a drink or decided he was cold or noticed a hang nail. He'd argue that he really was listening while chasing a bouncy ball around or teetering back and forth on the top step of the upstairs space where we did most of our schoolwork. I was trying so hard to keep my lesson short (a key aspect of writing workshop I had long since conquered in a classroom of first graders), but I was finding it a huge challenge.

He had trouble distinguishing the important information. Often I'd begin a lesson with an engaging little connection relating the work we were doing to skiing or something else I knew would interest him and provide a metaphor. (I thought this had always worked so well in my classroom.) But my son just couldn't get past any analogies or anecdotes I mentioned. They made him think of stories he wanted to tell or questions he wanted to ask that were tangentially related. I tried to be accepting of his anecdotes-- but he can really chat when he wants to and I often felt my intended lesson plan getting derailed after that. So I started telling him to wait till after writing to tell stories. He was grumpy about it. (Wasn't I just talking about skiing?? Why couldn't he talk about skiing too?) I realized he didn't understand what parts of all my talking were important to pay attention to. (He told me once, "It's sort of like, I'm really good at remembering the details when I read but sometimes it's hard for me to know the main idea.") Even on days he appeared to be listening, when I'd gotten through what I wanted him to hear that day and it was time to write, he often looked like a deer in the headlights and he even apologized: "I'm sorry, I forgot. What am I supposed to do?"

He needed more time than I expected. I was amazed at how long he could take just to get started on some days. I know it helps young kids to brainstorm with a partner or sketch their ideas in pictures or tell the story orally before they write anything. W seemed to need an extreme amount of this type of planning time. He would spend entire writing sessions pacing, shooting down ideas I suggested, and staring into space. When I checked in with him, he insisted, "I'm thinking!" It took lots of time and energy to make an outline or settle on a basic plot for a story. His time frame was not what I or my curriculum had planned on and I often felt slightly frantic at how easily we could get days "behind." I just couldn't make him go any faster in this process even though I foolishly tried sometimes. I should have known better, because one of the biggest truths I've learned in parenting is, the more you push a kid to do something, the harder they will push back. When I nagged him to just get down to business already, it only slowed him down more.

What I Learned

How he feels matters. I learned how important his mood was in how the entire writing time, if not the entire day, went. (We played around with the schedule a bit but always came back to writing first thing in the morning). My tone and word choice and reactions really, really mattered because they had a big impact on his mood. No matter how much I wanted him to just cooperate or to be really productive, I had to learn to bite my tongue and be sensitive to his mood. I offered tea while he worked. I found as many things as I could to compliment. I found it helped him stay positive and work hard when he had things to look forward to later in the day that I could remind him of, like seeing a friend or having something for dinner he likes. I had to continually think about what I could do to make him feel at ease, and to help him feel confident.

Focus on the essential teaching point. I learned to get the lesson to the (almost) bare bones. I had to really think about whether to include with my teaching the fun anecdotes he was so interested in but that were so distracting. I had to rethink the busy colorful posters meant to remind him of more and more strategies. I had to reconsider whether to include every rich tidbit of wisdom sprinkled through every part of the lesson and work session and share portion. I learned to subtract a lot of that out even though I thought it was all great, and glean for myself the essential parts that I wanted him to consider and try in his work. Then I could help him see and hold onto those essential parts. There was no point trying to do it all because it wasn't all getting through. He's more of a natural detail guy than a main idea guy and I had to change my teaching to get him to see the main idea.

An increasingly busy chart of strategies for a fiction writing unit

Read him better. Some days he wanted to work more independently. When he paused to look up or pace I learned not to interfere unless he asked me a question and then only to answer briefly so as not to interrupt his train of thought. On other days he simply couldn't start on his own. He wanted me there alongside him to talk it out and encourage him to put down what he'd just said. I gave him more or less space depending on what he needed.

Check for understanding. I've certainly gotten to know him better this year. For the most part I can recognize when I am speaking to him but he is somewhere else mentally and hasn't heard me-- even if he says, "Uh-huh" or "Okay." I learned I had to have him repeat every essential thing I wanted him to learn in his own words, and be involved every step of the way to be sure he was really on the same page as me. I had to have him, not me, write the bulleted tips or ideas or he'd never internalize them. Both the visual and the act of writing it down himself helped. These are all perhaps obvious strategies for monitoring attention. But in the classroom I hadn't been able to do all these things for every attention-challenged child for the entirety of every lesson like I was learning to do now at home for one student who needed it.

Truly go his speed. It took more time than I thought it would to move through these great units, but to make it work for him, that was part of the process. I kept reminding myself that an important reason, and one of the main reasons I gave W, for homeschooling was so that we could go his speed and work at his level with schoolwork. In many areas (math, for example) this has meant we can move at a faster rate than he'd be going in a classroom. In writing, it was certainly a slower rate than the program dictated or than I expected, and I had to let that be okay too. He always produced quality work eventually, it just took time.

Find focus tools that help. During writing time more than any other part of the day, we tried various gadgets to help W focus (both on me when I was trying to teach him something, and on his work during work time). Most of the strategies I suggested felt novel to him, and he was not self-conscious about trying them at home. So we were able to find which helped and which didn't. The effective strategies we've used have included:

• sugar-free gum to chew 
• life savers to suck on
• a cardboard shield to block out visual distractions around him and create his own private work space
• noise-cancelling headphones, with or without soothing music
• a "parking lot" post-it note pad for him to jot a word or two down so he could remember something he wanted to say if we were in the middle of working and it wasn't the right time to get into it
• a bumpy rubber wiggle seat that he could wiggle on and receive sensory input all he needed while staying seated to do the actual writing
• allowing him to move around (within reason) while listening and talking, but especially during brainstorming, figuring out how to word a sentence, and while working independently. 

A couple of "parked" thoughts to remind him of funny stories he wanted to tell me later (about Tintin and Heathcliff) amid lots of writing notes

Noise-cancelling headphones

Privacy shield

Writing Growth

W didn't immediately take off as a writer on day one this year and the road has not always been smooth since then, but when I step back and think about all the writing he has done and can do now, I am so proud of how much he's grown.

Compare-and-contrast literary essay in progress

There was one afternoon a few months ago when he was finishing up some writing and I looked over his shoulder to check on him and I couldn't help exclaiming, "You used paragraphs! I'm so proud of you!" No matter how many pieces we had edited together in order to separate one giant blob of writing into sections, he had yet to actually draft a piece organized into paragraphs from the beginning. Remembering paragraphs had been such a hurdle, even in five-paragraph essays where the the time for a new paragraph is pretty clear-cut. And here he was leaving a space between chunks of thought all on his own. He said, "Yeah, I thought you'd be proud of me for that." Was I ever. This was one of those magical moments in teaching when you realize how far a student has come.

Paragraphs!

Life Savers at the ready

He is now grown-up enough in managing his own level of focus that he can work in the same room with multiple family members. He chooses the accommodations when he needs them and takes care of them on his own.

Really busy table scenes now that we're ALL homeschooling

His writing has much greater clarity than it used to. He knows how to fix a sentence fragment or a run-on. He uses commas (mostly) correctly. He capitalizes and ends every sentence with punctuation. The way he grips his pen is correct now and he can write pages (some days) at a time without wearing out. His writing is legible and sometimes downright neat!

I remember the many times over the last couple of school years that he would state as fact that he doesn't like writing. But there are as many times this year when he has started to say, "It's not that I don't like it; it's just that it's hard for me to get started" or "It just takes a lot of effort for me." I am glad he is getting to know himself better and has grown some confidence in himself as a writer. I can see how proud he is of his finished products.

In Conclusion
If I am able to homeschool again next year, I will certainly want to continue to teach writing explicitly and give my kids time to develop skills through modeling and strong example texts and lots of time to practice. But, my perspective is a bit different than it was a year ago. I think writing was the thing I felt the most expert in as a teacher coming into this year, and yet it might be the area I have learned the most in. Writing time sort of became my laboratory to understand my son as a student and to work on all things-- our relationship in this new zone, my patience, his anxiety about work that felt hard and new, his challenges with focusing himself that varied by day. My son has really taught me how much the teacher needs to adapt to each student. I've thought about my former students as individuals, including those with attention deficit, and how I might have tried to teach them differently based on what I've learned this year. That's not to say that in a classroom it is ever easy to meet twenty different people where they are and give them all exactly what they need. But working with my one kid, one on one this year, with all his strengths and challenges, really taught me more about the need for lots of sensitivity and responsiveness to each and every student. The progress I've gotten to see in writing was helped by a strong program but was mostly because I figured out what worked well for my kid.