I have been quietly tearing out my hair over this.
My son and I have done the first four weeks of the first program in the Classical Writing progymnasmata; Aesop. At week five I decided to fold my daughter in with us. This is week six.
The idea of the program is to read the stories and then narrate them. This is familiar territory to us as we have been doing this with our history material for about two years now. (My daughter, actually, has only been at it about a year.)
Then child works on his or her re-telling to meet certain writing objectives. According to the appendix, these objectives are:
By the end of "A:"
1. Change sentence types.
2. Change quotation type. (From indirect to direct).
3. Reposition quote explanatory words
4. Vary utterances
5. Make up new quotes for characters
6. Change noun synonyms and modifiers
7. Come up with verb synonyms.
At the end of "B" the child will be able to do all of the above and
1. Write quotes with different positions for explanatory words and varied utterances.
2. Change the verb modifiers.
We are on Week 6 (of 18) in "A." In my teacher's manual I am told that next week we will begin "adding quotations" to our retelling. Well, we've been doing that from the start! We've also been playing around with sentence types. That was fun for exactly one model!
I was bored with it. I wanted something more interesting and engaging for us. However, until tonight, I hadn't read through the rest of the directions for the re-writes.
Weeks 1-6 focus simply on re-telling. Get the story order right. Get the characters right. (sigh).
However, it seems the fun begins next week.
Weeks 7 to 11 focus exclusively on adding quotations and varying utterances. (This may sound dull, but there are some interesting directions in the Teachers Core manual, such as asking about the tone of voice, how the character may be feeling, his posture, and the look on his face. This could actually be fun!)
Weeks 12-13, the above plus noun synonyms.
Weeks 14-18, all of the above plus verb synonyms.
Now that I have looked through it in detail, it doesn't look too bad. I guess those thesauruses I bought will come in handy!
3 comments:
it' funny how the program can change when we sit down and read all the directions! I started CW with my older girls last year and then stopped doing it. The directions were a little much for me...I felt like the directions were scattered throughout 2 books, and hard to remember all the parts. I'm going to give it a second try. They are too old for the program, I have this thing about hating to 'skip' anything tho, I hope they don't find it boring like you guys did.
good luck with it, keep us posted...
I'm surprised at children being "too old" for the progymnasmata approach, as most high school students would have to work at many of the exercises. Every now and again, I'd throw some of the "grammar" level exercises at my college freshmen just to watch them struggle with having to think through a text in that way.
Aesop A&B concerns itself with having children re-write fables and narratives, such as the fables by Aesop and Anderson and stories by James Baldwin in Fifty Famous Stories Re-told. The material, if not the excercises--and maybe even those, may be too "young" for children over 10.
I assume Jenny's kids have already been exposed to the material.
Good to see you again, Wende!
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