Composition with an Eye toward Development

Some professors wonder why educators even teach spelling instruction because of spell checkers. Hopefully, their students will not become sign makers (or cake decorators or church secretaries or ...) when they grow up.



While Pamela lags her peers in writing, she has come far. At least, she self-corrects spelling and grammar. She cares about how she writes for she changed grey to gray and was to were in her latest written narration of Fog Warning by Winslow Homer. She enjoys typing on Skype with my husband Steve through my account. The other day I found this exchange:

Tammy: I will buy a pizza today.

Stephen: ha ha

Tammy: I said Buy a Pizza today.

While I do not teach composition, I do assess what Pamela types. The first sentence is perfect. I have never corrected her writing with a red pencil as my English composition teacher did in high school, and Pamela can still write a perfect sentence. What a feat for someone who struggled with verb tense in her late teens! When Steve did not take her seriously, Pamela added emphasis with I said and by capitalizing buy and pizza. I love how subtly she made her point!

Pamela could improve upon that second sentence by adding punctuation, I said, "Buy a Pizza today." But, I do not plan to draw attention to it. Who wants to chat if someone turns everything into language arts lessons? Charlotte Mason's method works on composition without constant correction. The living books we read have many examples of dialogue. The copywork in her commonplace book has quotations. I need to teach her to enclose partial quotes in quotation marks and capitalize the names of countries, which I will incorporate into her studied dictation.



One sentence cracked me up! Commonplace books are basically written scrapbooks of items a person finds important. Pamela turned her old copywork book into a compilation of lists. In this one, Pamela summarized an episode of WordWorld which she watches at my parents' house: Frog helps Bug figure out a rhyme.




Dialogue is part of our recent studied dictation. While the swan dictation has no quotes, the one about Michael Faraday does. I can overlook the misspelling of Ribeau (a French surname) and massaging (a tricky word with French roots). Our next dictation will focus commas and capitalization for quotations.

Because of Pamela's aphasia, I tabled written narrations until this year. I am not alone in waiting for the right time developmentally. One mom at the Living Education Retreat shared that her teenager with autism struggled with writing. She found a therapy that helped him with his oral narration, and she had him spend a year retelling everything. Now, he is writing wonderful narrations with more confidence.

Early is not necessarily better! A recent study analyzing the lives of people over an eighty-year period concluded that, "Early school entry was associated with less educational attainment, worse midlife adjustment and, most importantly, increased mortality risk”. Why? “Most children under age six need lots of time to play, and to develop social skills, and to learn to control their impulses. An over-emphasis on formal classroom instruction—that is, studies instead of buddies, or staying in instead of playing out—can have serious effects that might not be apparent until years later."

This is exactly what Charlotte Mason stated over a century ago! It is why I am a purist in trying to apply her educational ideas before I try others.

It is why I trust recitation of nursery rhymes and Bible songs for children under the age of six. They need to play with words rather than endure formal lessons.

It is why I have not abandoned penmanship (even cursive) in the era of keyboards. Brain imaging reveals that "in children who had practiced self-generated printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and 'adult-like' than in those who had simply looked at letters." Cursive offers even more benefits: "multiple areas of brain become co-activated during learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters, as opposed to typing or just visual practice" and "cursive activates areas of the brain that do not participate in keyboarding."

It is why Pamela and I write our own copywork, which John Piper chose as the number one technique for reading and understanding the Bible. The article on cursive noted that "writing letters in meaningful context, as opposed to just writing them as drawing objects, produced much more robust activation of many areas in both hemispheres."

It is why I do hardly any lessons on composition, which Mason discussed in her final volume. The building blocks of composition lie in memorizing beautiful language, reading living books, retelling them in your own words, copying your favorite turn of phrase, and writing passages from dictation. But, above all, oral narration is the foundation of written narration. Uncorrected, uninterrupted oral narration!

Here are my favorite quotes from Mason on the topic of composition in the elementary years:

Children of six can tell to amazing purpose. The grown-up who writes the tale to their 'telling' will cover many pages before getting to the end of "Hans and Gretel" or "The Little Match Girl" or a Bible story. The facts are sure to be accurate and the expression surprisingly vigorous, striking and unhesitating....

Two or three points are important. Children in lB require a quantity of matter to be read to them, graduated, not according to their powers which are always present, but they require a little time to employ their power of fixed attention and that other power which they possess of fluent narration. So probably young children should be allowed to narrate paragraph by paragraph, while children of seven or eight will 'tell' chapter by chapter. Corrections must not be made during the act of narration, nor must any interruption be allowed....

Children must not be teased or instructed about the use of stops or capital letters. These things too come by nature to the child who reads, and the teacher's instructions are apt to issue in the use of a pepper box for commas....

As the object of every writer is to explain himself in his own book the child and the author must be trusted together, without the intervention of the middle-man. What his author does not tell him he must go without knowing for the present. No explanation will really help him, and explanations of words and phrases spoil the text and should not be attempted unless children ask, What does so and so mean? when other children in the class will probably tell....

But let me again say there must be no attempt to teach composition.

P.S. For a modern look at Mason's ideas, try to get a copy of Dr. Jennifer Spencer's dissertation: "Self-Made Writer: A Grounded Theory Investigation of Writing Development Without Writing Instruction in a Charlotte Mason Home School."

Pamela's Poem Marathon

I thought I was too tired to blog today, but then Pamela goes and ruins it for me by doing something wonderful. She was upstairs and I called her to come down, so we could finish reading. She sneaked off to the porch very mysteriously while I got out the books. I walked over to her, sitting in a rocking chair, writing intently. Without my asking a thing, Pamela looks up and announces, "I'm doing a poem marathon." I had no idea what a poem marathon was. After she finished, I learned that a poem marathon is copying all the poems you learned last year on one sheet of paper. She had gone through the trouble of going through her language art's folder from 2006-2007 to find all of her copywork sheets! She wrote the following ten poems for her celebration:

"Growing Up" by A. A. Milne
"Daffodowndilly" by A. A. Milne
"The End" by A. A. Milne
"Cradle Song" by Alfred Lord Tennyson
"Pirate Story" by Robert Louis Stevenson
City by Langston Hughes
"Big" by Dorothy Aldis
"Two Friends" by Nikki Giovanni
Acclamation
Psalm 117

By the way, we started The Story of the Trapp Family Singers today, and Pamela is thrilled for she adores The Sound of Music. We came across an interesting word combination that reminds me of how the brain learns. At the 2006 ChildLightUSA Conference, Dr. Carroll Smith said something that has stuck with me. For knowledge to be stored into long-term memory, the child must connect it to previously learned knowledge. Clearly, Pamela will be connecting new knowledge about Maria von Trapp to what she knows from the musical. While whistling and running up the stairs were familiar troublesome behaviors, Pamela narrated that Maria slid down the stairs [bannister] and jumped over chimneys on the roof! Near the end of the passage, Maria talked about carrying a guitar and leather satchel. Up until a month ago, the words leather and satchel meant very little to Pamela. We have learned a great deal about the making and uses of leather from The Brendan Voyage and the meaning of satchel because of a chapter by that name in The Winged Watchman. To take the whole thing full circle back to the poem marathon, we came across the word afloat when Tim got his leather boat, The Brendan, afloat for the first time and both of our minds leaped to "The Pirate Story." This is why we have not done formal vocabulary lessons.

For a better view of the poem marathon, click the pictures.

Daffodowndilly

Just when I think I have Pamela figured out, she amazes me again! Last Sunday, I mentioned Pamela's mastery of two verses from A.A. Milne's poem, Growing Up On Wednesday, she nailed the entire poem! I am stunned, speechless! This is truly a miracle. She has never memorized a verse of a poem in three months, much less three days!

For years and years, I have avoided recitation because trying to teach an aphasiac poetry was painful. Her tongue tripped over little words, her word order was all over the map, and she sputtered and stuttered. Memorization of anything except catchy phrases from television and radio was completely out of reach. Yes, I settled for "No payments until October 2006" and "I just saved a bunch of money on car insurance by switching to Geico" because it was better than nothing. After disastrous flirtations with recitation, I concluded Charlotte Mason was totally wrong about recitation when she said, "All children have it in them to recite; it is an imprisoned gift waiting to be delivered, like Ariel from the pine" (Volume 1, page 223). Being imprisoned in the pine with Ariel seemed more inviting that teaching Pamela poetry.

It only took ten years, but I have finally found a system for memorizing poetry that works for Pamela. When she recites "Growing Up," her face shines and she giggles. A.A. Milne poetry is now part of her repertoire of stim phrases, repeated for her personal enjoyment. If given the choice between stimming on advertising and poems, the latter wins!

Charlotte Mason recommended teaching poetry through auditory channels, Pamela's weak spot. I have known for years that she is a visual-kinesthetic learner, so other elements of Miss Mason's philosophy work better for memorization of poetry (copywork and studied dictation). Here are the steps:

First, I type up the poem in prose fashion and slightly alter the spelling and grammar to conform to standard Americanized English. Here is how Pamela's new poem, "Daffodowndilly" by Milne, usually appears:

She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,
She wore her greenest gown;
She turned to the south wind
And curtsied up and down.
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbour:
"Winter is dead."

This is how the poem appears in Pamela's studied dictation sheet:

She wore her yellow sun-bonnet. She wore her greenest gown. She turned to the south wind and curtsied up and down. She turned to the sunlight and shook her yellow head, and whispered to her neighbor, "Winter is dead."

Second, I break up the poem into manageable pieces. For Pamela, four lines is the right length, and she focuses on four lines at a time.

Third, Pamela writes the first four lines of the poem from the studied dictation for her copywork (penmanship).

Fourth, she studies the typed version. When ready, I recite the poem to her, a few words at a time, and she writes what she hears on a clean sheet of paper. When finished, she compares what she wrote to the typed version to look for any mistakes.

Fifth, whenever she makes a mistake in her dictation, I turn it into a grammar lesson for the next day. Prior to the next studied dictation, we cover a short lesson that will help her avoid the error in future dictations. She repeats step four and cycle from grammar lesson to studying to dictation until she makes absolutely no mistakes.

Sixth, after a perfect dictation, I ask her to recite. Usually her recitation is nearly correct, but halting. Within a few days, she has perfected it!

Seventh, we go back to the third step, turning our focus to the first eight lines of the poem. I keep adding four lines at a time until she has mastered the entire poem as copywork and studied dictation. After all the visual and kinesthetic work, the recitation comes much more naturally!

I know this sounds dull and tedious, but it is not! Yesterday, when Pamela started "Daffodowndilly" she had already placed her next order for "The End" by Milne. For the first time ever, memorizing poetry is sheer joy.

Who's Coming Out with Me?

We follow a Charlotte Mason philosophy of education. Pamela does copywork (for penmanship) and studied dictation (for grammar, spelling, capitalization, or punctuation). She has never been able to master recitation of poetry because she found it difficult to remember what little word went where. Over the summer, I had some revelations, and my new approach seems to be working! Yesterday, on the drive to see the movie One Night with the King, Pamela recited the first two verses of "Growing Up" by A.A. Milne, to her father, just for fun:

I’ve got shoes with grown up laces.
I’ve got knickers and a pair of braces.
I’m all ready to run some races.
Who’s coming out with me?

I’ve got a nice new pair of braces.
I’ve got shoes with new brown laces.
I know wonderful paddly places.
Who’s coming out with me?

Every morning my new grace is,
“Thank you, God, for my nice braces.
I can tie my new brown laces.”
Who’s coming out with me?

The answer came to me at a Charlotte Mason conference in Boiling Springs, North Carolina last June when three presentations and one of Pamela's abilities inspired the final solution. One presentation covered studied dictation and described a very simple, efficient way to do and document dictation, while another on recitation encouraged me to keep trying. The presentation about good instruction left me with a profound thought: information must have context and meaning and must be connected to previous knowledge for the mind to remember. Finally, I realized that Pamela had been reciting for years in the form of echolalia (television commercials and videos) and Mother Goose rhymes. She can memorize word patterns with enough exposure.

Since Pamela adores nursery rhymes, they must have meaning for her. Over the summer, she did studied dictation one rhyme at a time, which focused her mind on the context behind the little words she easily forgets. Because she has previous knowledge of these rhymes, dictation allowed her to focus upon little words. For every mistake made in a dictation, I wrote a short language arts lesson, providing both meaning and context behind the rules. Because it took a week or two of repeated dictations to get a perfect dictation, the process repeatedly exposed Pamela to a poem in a multi-sensory way (by seeing the poem while studying for a dictation, hearing me dictate it, and writing it for the dictation).

The big break through came after our first page of nursery rhymes. Pamela must have been bored for she handed me When We Were Very Young and she said, "I want 'Growing Up'"! She stunned me because that poem has twelve lines! Several sentences are very similar, and I would never have picked something I assumed to be so difficult. Going back to good instruction, this poem has meaning for Pamela. Having enjoyed the poem enough to ask for it, she clearly has previous knowledge of it. The proof is in the pudding for she has already mastered eight of twelve lines.

In the process of learning two verses, we have covered many topics in language arts: subjects and verbs, complete sentences, using uppercase versus lowercase letters in sentences, contractions for is, adding the suffix ful, adding y to words with e at the end, and using articles with singular versus plural nouns. Studied dictation is such an elegant way to teach children what they need to know when they need to know!