Recommendations for Grammar Composition lessons for reluctant writer?

Question

I am homeschooling my son for the first time this year. I have been using Learning Language Arts Through Literature and am supplementing with a journal. My son is 6 1/2 y and is a reluctant writer. He has ADHD and says he feels like the words and sentences are "filling up his head" and won't come out. Please no comments on the validity or existence of ADHD. Apparently some children with this disorder have difficulty with expressive speech, so does this include writing? He also has some fine motor delays, detected from tests by a licensed psychologist. He is using the red book for LLATL, but I am concerned with its lack on composition instruction. The public schooled children in my neighborhood are composing simple paragraphs in 1st and 2nd grades. Right now he dictates to me and I write his thoughts down, then he copies them onto manuscript paper. Is there a better way? He is frustrated and I am, too. Sometimes he chooses the topic and sometimes it comes from a lesson.

Answer 1

Don't force it, he's just 6! My brother had a hard time with reading and grammar at that age. My mom repeated 1st grade with him and he did fine. Pushing him will only stress him. Try looking into Montessori schools.

Answer 2

Can you take it real slow? Get him to write one thing about a subject. Not a composition, just one thing. Not worrying about sentences, or paragraphs, or spelling, or quantity yet. Just one thing about something really simple.

"Rain is wet."

or

"My house is yellow."

The trick with my son was to get him to write one thing at a time, or like you say they think of all these ideas and don't know where to start. My son would spend 40 minutes out of the 45 he was given thinking about what to write, and then have no time left for the writing.

Once he's got the hang of writing one thing, can he write two? My son is now eight and when he panics about writing about a subject, I tell him to write five things he thinks are good about it, and then five things he thinks are bad about it. He can do that no problem. But tell him to write a composition about it and he'll freak.

I'd be very loathe to do all the writing for your son. If he's telling you the words and sentences, they're coming out of his head. Can you repeat them back to him at a speed he can write at? You just have to encourage him that it's absolutely normal for him to have more ideas and faster than he can get them down on paper.

Answer 3

6 1/2 is a little young for grammar and comp.

You should be working with a junior reader that has pictures and simple lines of text and let his see the words in action.

Then maybe work on him doing stick figure comic book pictures of his own using simple lines of text for dialog or action.

Sounds like trying to run before you can walk.

We used flash cards and words on a peg board through most of 1st grade and then got into the old d**k and Jane reading books.

Third grade is when we started writing essays and book reports and doing more complex things.

We also had Sentence Diagraming.

He probably doesn't even understand sentence structure yet.

You have to get into subject, noun, modifier, connecting words.

You're trying to do this like high school Spanish and that often leaves kids in the dust.

You need to get photographs or pictures and show how the words work.

A picture of a boy running

John is running.

Then you get into JOHN, the boys name, a noun, which describes a person, place of thing. In this case JOHN is a person.

IS is a connecting word that goes back to JOHN.

Running is an action word.  In this case it means running, like running around the room.

John IS running

The IS refers back to John to show what he is doinging.

Now you can go to a picture of a girl sitting and

Sue is sitting.

You soon learn with simple sentences are and how they are constructed.

Then you get pictures with no words and let him make up the words based on what he has learned and TRY not to be negative.

If there are two boys running and he makes up names and syas

Bob and Jim is running

You don't fault him.

He correct him

IS only applies to ONE person.  If it was just Bob running it would be correct.

But with more than one we use ARE

Bob and Jim ARE running.

When it gets too much for him you have to stop, let him absorbe it and master it before going on.

You're trying to get him to do Caculus problems before he has adqueately learned numbers.

This is how education fails.

And you're falling into the same trap.

Don't go over his head.

The way you are currently doing it is not bad, but I don't think he's "seeing" words and sentences, he's just transcribing your work.

That will ROTE him, but he won't have an understanding, just a memorization.

You are programming a computer, not letting the machine discover and learn through experience.

Answer 4

Regardless of any disorders that he may have been diagnosed with, he is only 6 1/2 years old.  Please just relax and enjoy being with your son at home, where you will be there to witness all of his Aha! moments right along with him.  

Don't worry about what the local school children are doing.  Do all children start to walk at the same time, become potty trained at the same time, or start talking at the same time?  The answer is no.  They all reach developmental milestones at their own speed.  If you try to constantly force him to write more than he is presently capable of, you will do nothing but teach him to hate writing.  That is what happened to my daughter while she was still in school.  A child who, in kindergarten, loved to try to write, hated writing with a passion after Grade 4.  It has taken me 4 years to try to undo the damage that they did by forcing her in the wrong ways.

At his age, I would Not be worried about this in any way, whatsoever.

Answer 5

I, too, have a 7 yo ADHD DS, but he has trouble with math so I don't ask him to do much (right now, we're just playing adding games).

The first thing to identify is what your purpose is for his writing.  Is it handwriting practice or paragraph generation?  If it's simply handwriting practice, he could copy anything.  If you want him to go through the steps of creating a paragraph, you may need a different method entirely, maybe starting with just one or two sentences and working up from there.

Which part of the current process is frustrating him?  Having to wait for you to write down what he says?  Maybe he could dictate into a tape recorder so he doesn't have to wait for you.  Then you write it down (while he works on something else) and he copies it when you're done.  Does he hate the copying/writing?  Young children (boys especially) have trouble with the fine motor skills necessary for writing, so it may pay to wait a few months (or even a year or more) before asking him to do much writing.

I've been using the A Beka grammar program (1st and 2nd) for my son and he wrote a paragraph at the end of the 1st grade book without even knowing that's what he was doing.  If I had asked him to write a paragraph about George Washington, he would have broken down, but when the book asked him to write 5 sentences using the list of words they gave, he had no problem.

Don't worry about comparing him to public school kids.  If you were following the public school model, you'd just enroll him in public school.  The greatest thing about homeschooling is the freedom to work at the pace that works for the child and not having to keep up with (or be held back by) the other students.  At 6 1/2, he'd only be in first grade, right?  That means he has 11 years to learn to write a cohesive paper.  Give him the time and space he needs to mature and develop so that this doesn't become something he hates.  Maybe drop writing for a while so you both have a chance to breathe.

Answer 6

It sounds as though he has a problem getting his thoughts to flow through to his hands and onto the paper. Rather than having him dictate to you and letting you write things down, have you tried dictating to him and letting him write them down? You might try dictating slowly, one word at a time at first, then eventually working up to two words at a time. As time goes on, increase it to three words... then four words. This exercise should go on daily until you finally can dictate short complete sentences to him and he writes them all down. After awhile he should get used to assembling his own thoughts into complete sentences and putting them on paper. I think it's worth a try, no?

Answer 7

I'm frankly surprised that the local public schooled children are composing ENTIRELY ON THEIR OWN simple paragraphs in 1st and 2nd grades. Are you sure they are doing it entirely on their own? I could maybe see 2nd grade, but 1st grade? Here, only the top of the class. And only by the end of the year.

Frankly, you are homeschooling. This means you can give your son the education that suits him rather than the blanket one he'd get at school. Don't be concerned. A 6.5yo is fine with doing copywork. The Charlotte Mason method has children do pretty much what you are doing (only writing is copywork; only composition is a telling to someone else) until the child is roughly 9 or so and demonstrates that they are ready. 6.5 for a boy is often YOUNG. Don't push it. Work on composing words for now or short sentences (This is a cat (with a cut-out picture of a cat above).) That LLATL doesn't have a lot of composition is NORMAL and even desirable.

Kids labelled ADHD often have other learning difficulties tied with it. So yes, difficulties with writing can be present.

Answer 8

To be honest, at  6.5 yo I wouldn't be worrying about his grammar skills yet.   That is awfully young.   I know of no 6.5 year old boy who isn't a reluctant writer.  *grin*  Most would rather be up running around and playing.  And if you mix ADD up in there it's going to make it worse.   Getting him frustrated with writing isn't going to help him want to write.

Have you heard of Dragon Speak?   It's a computer program that can type out the work for the child.  They can still edit and change it, but it gets those confusing thoughts out of their head and onto paper.

My son has dysgraphia.  It is a writing disability.   Because writing has been so hard for him, we've done a little bit of writing over the years but now in grade 9 he's gotten a better handle on it and we've started working on WriteShop which is a great program for writing.  

Good luck

Answer 9

It may be that he is just not ready for writing yet. It is best to avoid comparing your young child's accomplishments to those of others in the neighborhood. Kids develop at different rates, and some are able to develop specific skills before others. This does not mean that the slower child is any less intelligent than any of the others, it just means that they are not ready.  By about 4th grade the skill level of students who learned early tend to level out with those who learned later, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. Just wait a year or so and try writing again.

In the meantime read to your son and have him read to you. Most professional writers credit their ability to write well to reading books which are well written rather than to their own writing.  Keep in mind that you can read books such as Tom Sawyer, Stuart Little, or The Chronicles of Narnia now even though he is probably not yet ready to read those books himself.

Answer 10

I've been re-reading The Well Trained Mind. They recommend you leave writing until after the child has a good grasp on reading. If he has fine motor delays, that's all the more reason to leave writing until later. He will be better off delaying that until he's ready, than trying to make him ready now, as it's clear you are both stressed. You don't need to compare him too much to the public school kids at this age. For a homeschooler, competition doesn't need to start until he's trying to get into college. Start by installing a love of reading. Then move onto copying small parts of his favourite books, then some dictation from his favourite books. It will be a while before he can get the words out of his head and onto paper. I don't think that has much to do with ADD, more just because he's a little boy. Let him see you writing, even if it's just your shopping list. When he's ready, you can dictate your shopping list to him.

On a side note, do you give him fish oil tablets? That often helps with ADD.