I just needed to update you all on BigGuy’s writing.  I’m VERY. PLEASED with it!  He’s seriously coming along really well!!  We don’t work on this every day but after his first whipping out of a page of writing, I introduced the process of rewrites.  There is a local homeschool mom I admire very much and she recently divulged how she tackled writing instruction and the gusto with which she embraces the rewrite.  Her kids (who are high school age) know that there is pretty much no set number or max on rewrites.

I gave this some thought, and decided that I would really rather my son be prepared to rework his writing many times over than assume he was done after any set number (likely a number close to 3). 

But I don’t think that I’m imposing quite as rigorous an education as my friend.  Actually, as several of my friends–of who I am in constant awe of the sheer volume and quality of work their kids put out willingly.  I’m not going to beat myself up over it; but I am mindful of the need to transition my BigGuy to being able to put forth a level of effort he currently doesn’t put out.  You can see my quandary about this in my post “Applying Neurotypical Logic to Kids in the Spectrum”.  So, we are easing him into it.

The first iteration was simply to take his full page of written story and rewrite it with the paragraph breaks I inserted.  Before he did that, I wanted him to go through each paragraph and see if he had a topic sentence and a conclusion sentence.  But re-writing it was all about formatting:  break up the paragraphs, indent the first line of each paragraph, and use better spacing between words.  BigGuy has gone through years of occupational therapy and writes better than he used to, but he still needs to build endurance and clean it up.

Then we went through his story and talked about the topic sentence and conclusion sentence.  This rewrite now included both; and in a few paragraphs, he had to add a few sentences for clarity.  He noted that out of 9 islands, only three were inhabited.  What happens to the other 6?  If you say it’s a magical place and then describe it’s beauty but then add that there are dragons in this region–then shouldn’t we conclude that it has multiple reasons for being magical?  These were good discussions; and although you could see him uneasy at the idea of physically having to write more–he was totally understanding that these were necessary changes to make his story a better read.

The next go-round is going to be about expanding and clarifying his ideas.  I’m getting excited about it.  So is he.  He asked if he could turn it into a book.  I told him he absolutely could.

Of course, now *I* am getting excited.  ❤