Thing 2 is a wonderful person. He’s affectionate, personable, smart, generous, meticulous, and quirky. But he does not like to write. I think the teachers at my kids’ school are wonderful, but they don’t focus enough on writing, in my opinion. I don’t think either of my kids writes as well as they should be, so a few months ago I started having them write on the weekends.
Normally I would agree with those of you out there who think that elementary school kids should not be subjected to homework on the weekends. But in this case, both kids seemed to need help, and I thought that if we worked on it a little bit each weekend they could easily get to where I thought they should be. It started with just the words they frequently used, and frequently misspelled. I figured that there’s no sense having them write a story or something when they kept misspelling the same words over and over, both at home and at school.
A couple months went by and they seemed to get a grip on that, so I told them they had to write a story or essay; Thing 1 two pages, Thing 2 one page. I didn’t care what it was about, and didn’t even care about grammar or punctuation, or anything else. Well, my daughter likes to write, so she took to that like a fish to water. I’ve gradually introduced all those things into her writings, and she seems to be progressing quite well. She indents her paragraphs, doesn’t misspell frequently (and when she does she has to spell them over ten times), uses the same verb tense throughout the story, and is filling up three pages per weekend. I think she’s right where she should be for a kid her age.
Thing 2 is progressing well also, though he’s younger, so he’s on a different level. He’s not misspelling nearly as many words as he was, and when an idea comes to him he can usually drag it out to a whole page. But he does it against his will. He makes it very clear that he does not like writing, and frequently drags his assignment out as long as he possibly can.
One morning Thing 2 sat obstinately refusing to come up with an idea for his writing. I told him that I didn’t care what he wrote, but he had to fill a page. He cried and cried. He sat and he sat. Eventually, this is what he came up with.
I do not know what to write about. So I am going to write about not knowing what to write about. I do not want to write about cars. I do not want to write about gerals (girls). I do not want to write about planets. I do not want to write about love. I (do not) want to write about tigers. I do not want to write about deth (death). I do not want to write about inappriate worders (inappropriate words). I do not want to write about erasers. I do not want to write about juice. I do not want to write about water. I do not want to write about bricks. I do not want to write about boys. I do not want to write about my faveret (favorite) color. I do not want to write about anything because I do not like writing.
By the time he was done writing about all the things he had no desire to write about, he’d actually gone into the second page. If he’d stricken one of those things from his list he could have kept it to one page. I gave him a big hug, and told him that he had completed the assignment perfectly. Mind you, I didn’t let him use that ploy again, but it worked well once.
