<p>My two Ss hated writing their reading journals because they were asked to avoid plot summaries–which they could do very well–, and instead discuss their reactions to the readings–which they disliked. But this may be a boy thing.
In 7th and 8th grades, they had many, many writing assignments for both humanities and social studies (often combined). and these assignments were quite varied. Some involved research and were in the nature of expository writing, others involved writing poetry, or writing the scripts for the parts they would play in a performance that was tied to what they were studying.
If your D likes reading, ask her to write book reports. If she does not know how to start, ask her to tell you what’s in the book, what she thinks about it, what questions she has about the story, characters, etc… and then ask her to write what she told you down. This would end up being like a reading journal but would have a bit more structure.
You can do the same with newspaper articles. My S/s 7/8 teacher had a weekly assignment whereby students chose a newspaper article to write about.
Another possibility would be for your daughter to interview someone, perhaps a relative or older person in the community and write down the interview. In 8th grade, my S interviewed an elderly Chinese lady who’d come as a bride in an arranged marriage, had worked most of her life in a Chinese laundry, but had put her sons through MIT.
Basically, use any excuse to get her to write.</p>
<p>Those are excellent suggestions, Marite.</p>
<p>I also had a friend who encouraged writing by basically making the kids put every request that required persuasion into writing. You know, “why I need a cell phone.” “Why I should be allowed to attend X’s party past my curfew”…that kind of thing. It didn’t have to be a five-page paper, but it had to be persuasive and have a beginning, middle, conclusion structure and correct spelling and grammar. When my son was in seventh and eighth grade, I made a deal with him that if he wrote a review of the movie for me, I would pay for the ticket and popcorn when he went with friends rather than have it come out of his own savings. He is a miser so that appealed to him. The elementary and middle schools they attended did not assign enough writing, IMO, so any extra practice was helpful. By high school, though, the workload increased and he was earning his own money at a part-time job so no more movie reviews. It was fun while it lasted though.</p>
<p>Movie reviews! Very good jazzymom!</p>
<p>I get free movie reviews from my kids. The movies they like aren’t the kind I like, so off they go on their own or with Dad. Over dinner, I get to hear what the movie was about and whether they liked it or not. But nothing in writing.:)</p>
<p>I like the idea of having them write a persuasive paper in order to get something they want. A quick anecdote – my kids aren’t perfect, and we’ve had the normal arguments about things they wanted to do and which I didn’t want them to do. As they got to the teenage years, they became better at formulating an argument, with supporting evidence. One time in particular, S1wanted to take a trip to visit a college (one to which he’d been accepted, but I didn’t like the location). He had 4 schools on his final list, and we hadn’t visited 2 of them. He really presented a logical, unemotional, mature case for why he needed to see all of the schools. At the end of it, I could only agree – to do anything else would have been foolish.</p>
<p>Take it for what its worth, but I think one of the reasons I was so proficient at writing from a young age was all the time I spent on message boards seeing older posts post construct well written messages, and trying to emulate them.</p>
<p>I found taking a foreign language that relates well to English such as German clarified many things for me.</p>
<p>Barrons, your comment reminded me that a spanish teacher I know said that teaching a foreign language has become so much more difficult in the last 10 or so years because students have absolutely no understanding of English grammar and syntax. She resents having to go back and teach parts of speech and verb tense to high school students. However, English teachers say that after students get into a foreign language, their writing does improve.</p>
<p>My D has really improved her writing by participating in on-line Role-Playing Games, where they write very long & involved stories & share them. Her conventions (capitalizations, punctuation & spelling) still could use work, but she has great ideas & expresses them quite well. I notice she writes a LOT more when it’s HER idea. Will have to consider the idea of paying for the movie & dinner if she writes a persuasive paper about WHY she should go & what it will be about (doubt she’ll go for it tho–would probably rather spring for the money than deal with the CHORE).</p>
<p>I stopped taking Spanish after 5? years in HS & 3 years in college because I didn’t understand the English grammar for the Spanish we were studying (plus the only folks in my class were folks who were majoring in Spanish & I only wanted to learn it for “fun”).</p>