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."

Paperback Writer

Pamela and I shopped at Wal-Mart on Sunday night. She picked out a spiral notebook and told me she wanted to start another journal. In fact, she planned to make entries dating back to the year of her birth. Three years ago, I required Pamela and David to keep a journal, which they did for two years.

Yesterday, Pamela sat on the rocking chair on the back porch and filled fifteen pages, spanning 1989 through June 2004. I decided to type her journal to help me analyze it better. According the Word's readability statistics, she wrote 2,583 words at a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 4.8 in one day. She is amazing! When I told David about it, he quipped, "Oooo, paperback writer!"

For those of you with young children who despise writing, keep this in mind: Pamela cried and screamed at the sight of a pencil when she was six-and-a-half years old. I put her on a one-year sabbatical from writing to help her recover from this phobia. She started to learn to write at the age of seven-and-a-half, and I enlarged the paper supplied in Handwriting without Tears because the blocks were too small! She spent two years doing the first grade level of that writing program! Fast forward a decade later and she is flying in her ability to write legibly!

We have not covered past tense verbs in the association method, and she clearly struggled with irregular verbs, writing ated, blowed, wented, etc. Her efforts caused me to rethink my strategy for her language development. Now, I plan to do the following:

* Continue pursuing present tense (right now, I am introducing present tense plural) with her primers.

* Work on cleaning up past tense when narrating (both orally and in writing) books she is reading.

However tempting it may be, I do not plan to have her fix her journal entries. I think it would dampen her enthusiasm for keeping a journal. I see it as a record of where her syntax is at present. If Charlotte Mason can comfortably publish the unedited writings of her students, I can surely leave Pamela's journal as is.

"New" Handwriting Programs

My first narration of a breakout session from the conference will take another day or two, so I will share something interesting I read today on the Ambleside Online email list.

When I first began homeschooling, an occupational therapist, Nancy Kashman, gave me a copy of Handwriting without Tears, which turned out to be a great handwriting program for Pamela. Jan Olsen, also an occupational therapist and handwriting specialist, developed this style to allow children with fine motor delays to write with simpler letters and strokes. We were discussing this "new" handwriting program in our day, when a listmate recalled to our mind that Charlotte had discussed a "new" handwriting program in her day:

A 'New Handwriting.'--Some years ago I heard of a lady who was elaborating, by means of the study of old Italian and other manuscripts, a 'system of beautiful handwriting' which could be taught to children. I waited patiently, though not without some urgency, for the production of this new kind of 'copy-book.' The need for such an effort was very great, for the distinctly commonplace writing taught from existing copy-books, however painstaking and legible, cannot but have a rather vulgarising effect both on the writer and the reader of such manuscript. At last the lady, Mrs Robert Bridges, has succeeded in her tedious and difficult undertaking, and this book for teachers will enable them to teach their pupils a style of writing which is pleasant to acquire because it is beautiful to behold. It is surprising how quickly young children, even those already confirmed in 'ugly' writing, take to this 'new handwriting.'" (pages 235-236 of Volume 1)

The parallels between a "new" handwriting program in our day to that of Charlotte's day are just amazing:
* Both have vertical lines.
* Both teach letters in an order based upon the strokes needed.
* Both start with what they considered to be the simplest strokes first.
* Both reduced the number of ornamental flourishes a letter had in comparison to other styles of the day.

Moreover, on pages 233 through 235 of Volume 1, Charlotte herself gave tips for teaching handwriting very similar to those used by Jan Olsen in her program, backed by modern research!
* "Let the writing lesson be short; it should not last more than five or ten minutes."
* "First, let him print the simplest of the capital letters with single curves and straight lines."
* "When he can make the capitals and large letters, with some firmness and decision, he might go on to the smaller letters––'printed' as in the type we call 'italics,' only upright,––as simple as possible, and large."
* "By-and-by copies, three or four of the letters they have learned grouped into a word––'man,' 'aunt'."
* "At this stage the chalk and blackboard are better than pen and paper."
* "Set good copies before him, and see that he imitates his model dutifully."
* "Do not hurry the child into 'small hand'; it is unnecessary that he should labour much over what is called 'large hand,' but 'text-hand,' the medium size, should be continued until he makes the letters with ease."

Compare Charlotte's advice to what Jan Olsen describes as advantages to her program and you will conclude what wonderful powers of observation Charlotte had: workbook design, teaching strategies, teaching method, time management, and research.

Blast from the Past: Capital Crazy

At age seven and a half, Pamela had mastered her pre-writing skills and seemed ready to write. An occupational therapist and dear friend, Nancy Kashman, gave me a copy of the first grade level of Handwriting without Tears. Had the pre-K and Kindergarten materials been available, I would have tried those first! The teacher’s guide provided excellent tips, especially for teaching lefties! Many parents of children with autism find this program, developed by occupational therapist Jan Z. Olsen, effective in teaching children to write.

Homeschoolers have many opinions of what penmanship program is the most effective. Some prefer the traditional ball and stick concept because what the child writes matches the kind of text they seen in print. I believe Handwriting without Tears is one of the best programs in this category (backed by research). Her teacher’s guide includes tips for avoiding letter reversals, which is one of the cons mentioned by those who prefer other methods. Pamela struggled to learn curves and found Jan Olsen’s minimalist style with few curlicues and flourishes easier to master. Other homeschoolers prefer italics like Getty-Dubay or D’Nealian because of an easy transition to cursive, reduced number of pencil lifters, and smaller potential for letter reversal. Programs for language delayed children like the association method start with reading print, but writing with cursive to focus the child upon whole words. One creative friend let her son pick letters he likes the most by comparing them at sites like Educational Fonts: he prefers a blend between Getty-Dubay and D’Nealian.

We spent the first half of Pamela’s second year as a homeschooler practicing the formation of capital letters following Handwriting without Tears’ wet-dry-try method on a slate with a piece of chalk and sponges. My kids, the super-smash siblings, broke the slate before Pamela had mastered her capitals, so I improvised by taping a border with electrical tape onto a dry erase board. One advantage to this innovation was that I could gradually make the box for writing capitals smaller and smaller as Pamela’s control improved. I could also spell words on the dry erase board by taping several boxes. Four months may seem a long time to practice capitals off paper, but Pamela’s first efforts on paper in January of that school year show how difficult she found writing legibly.

Thanks to our sabbatical from writing and Blues Clues, Pamela had made friends with markers. When we reintroduced writing letters on paper, three strategies helped her learn to write legibly. First, because she had a tendency to press too hard with pencils, we started her off with markers in January and transitioned to pens in April. Had gel pens been available, I would have tried those before ballpoint pens. Second, she had difficulty writing with small print, and I later learned macrographia was common for children with autism due to differences in their cerebellums. The blocks in Handwriting without Tears’ gray block paper were too small, so I made copies with enlarged images until I found a block size successful for Pamela. As her control improved, she worked her way down to the regular-sized blocks for letters she had mastered, but still needed enlarged blocks for new letters. Third, Pamela wrote with greater ease in the vertical plane, so we started her off with writing on paper taped to the refrigerator. Then we transitioned to a slant board, which is very expensive. Nancy Kashman told me how to make them out of thick three-ringed notebooks. As her writing improved, I gave her thinner and thinner notebooks until she could write on a horizontal plane.

In the second half of that year, we had daily writing lessons of less than fifteen minutes. Like Charlotte Mason, Jan Olsen recommends short lessons. She puts letters in order of strokes, and Pamela practiced those with starting lines that begin in the upper left corner of a block and flow down to the lower left corner. Pamela did well with straight lines and letters with one large curve, so I had her write DEFHLK only once. We practiced her challenging letters first on the dry erase board and followed up with several repetitions of PRB on paper, especially B. She learned M and N next.

By February, she had learned all the starting letters with a vertical line going down from the upper left corner. Pamela showed signs of being able to print small letters. In February, we worked in letters with starting points in the center of the top edge of the gray block. We choose A first so that Pamela could spell her first name! Then we covered other center starters IJ and those that start in the upper left corner, but go in other directions TVWXYZ.

In March, Pamela was ready for curved letters like COQ, but needed the enlarged gray block paper at first. Then she learned GSU.

By April, Pamela could write the entire alphabet in capital letters and her first name on the gray block paper. We introduced two new things: writing with a pen and numbers (on the enlarged gray block paper).

In May and June, I assigned extra copywork on primary tablet paper with a seasonal theme.

Pamela’s final paper at the end of the school year was far from perfect. Although she understood catchy little phrases from Handwriting without Tears like “bump the bottom,” Pamela never really mastered perfect control. Her lines strayed outside of the gray blocks and her straight lines sometimes wavered.

Even today, after years of practice, she does not perfectly execute her letters. I keep in mind three soothing thoughts: Pamela enjoys writing and does it in her free time! Her writing is large, loopy, but legible. Some children in the autism spectrum have dysgraphia and struggle to write anything. We are blessed Pamela can write as well as she does.

Blast from the Past: Pre-Writing Skills

Pamela attended special education preschool and kindergarten through age six. Like many children with autism, she has delays in her fine motor skills. Having interacted with many homeschoolers of children with autism, I have found this to be common for our kids. Most children in the autism spectrum, even high functioning ones, find writing frustrating.

In hopes of helping Pamela catch-up with her peers, her teachers pushed too much writing before she was developmentally ready for it! Pamela had not mastered the fine motor skills expected of a preschooler by the age of six. She did not enjoy scribbling and showed absolutely no interest in drawing, and yet her teacher sent home worksheets for her to practice writing like the one pictured here. Whenever I pulled out paper and something with which to write, Pamela let loose a series of piercing screams to show her dismay!

Fortunately, I “met” another homeschooler with an autistic child online—this was in 1994 and such a creature was rare in cyber space. She encouraged me to take a sabbatical from writing and focus upon pre-writing skills to reduce Pamela’s frustrations. My cyber mentor gave me tips from the National Academy of Child Development for assessing her dominance, lateral abilities, and writing readiness. Another homeschooler with an autism child has recorded her experience with NACD in Too Wise To Be Mistaken, Too Good To Be Unkind.

The first problem I identified with my cyber mentor’s help was dominance, or lack thereof. Pamela appeared to be ambidextrous, never having developed hand preference. My friend suggested I check Pamela’s eye, ear, and leg for dominance by observing her preferences in different situations. The ideal is for all three plus the hand to share dominance on the same side. Pamela showed preferred her left side in every part. They all matched, which emboldened me to promote her left hand. As both of her grandfathers are southpaws and people with autism have a higher rate of left-handedness, I was not surprised. Within six months, Pamela became a strong leftie, confirming my suspicions that her Special Education teachers had been forcing her to be right handed. Apparently, many southpaws have experienced problems from inconsiderate teachers!

The second issue I addressed was hand and finger strength. While today many wonderful products are on the market for developing this skill, they were hard to find back in 1995. Back then, stress balls were rare, and the Koosh ball fad had bypassed the Glaser house. The Internet, in its infancy, was devoid of articles with tips on strengthening the fingers and hands of preschoolers or winter fun! I had Pamela play with clay, squeeze sponges and pick up little toys with tongs and with clothespins. We spent time at a playground near our home because climbing equipment develops finger strength among other things.

Pamela’s third challenge involved crossing the midline and alternating feet going up and down the stairs. We did numerous exercises to improve coordination, much like what is available today through Brain Gym. For two years, we got on our hands and knees several times a day, crawling with various patterns. We played handclapping games like Say, Say Oh, Playmate and worked our way up to Miss Mary Mack. Pamela sat at a table, took objects from one side of a mat, and placed them in a bowl on the other side of the mat, one at a time. She did this for each side and eventually learned to do this by alternating hands. She learned to do various knee touching patterns as well and walked the stairs in our apartment complex every day. By the end of our first year of homeschooling, Pamela had mastered crossing the midline and alternating feet going up the steps!

We played hooky from any form of writing for an entire year, and Pamela slowly lost her phobia of writing. While I retreated from writing on paper, we worked in letter awareness in other ways. Ironically, Pamela was already reading, so recognition was not an issue. I had to find some way to introduce motor plans for making letters without having the stress of pencil and paper. Sensory Integration resources like The Out-of-Sync Child Has Fun did not exist, but my friend and occupational therapist, Nancy Kashman, gave me wonderful ideas for blending sensory integration and pre-writing activities like the following:

• Scribble and draw with crayon stubs as a natural way to encourage pencil grip and strengthen finger muscles.
• For kids not interested in scribbling, buy coloring books with their favorite cartoon character—the key is to scribble with a stub, not to color perfectly within the lines.
• Pick up small objects hidden in dry beans and rice and match with magnetic letters.
• Draw letters with finger, paintbrush, or stick in shaving cream on a tray, fingerpaint, pudding, sand, etc.
• Draw letters in the air.
• Experiment with differently sized crayons and pencils with and without pencil grips.
• Peel the paper off crayons if the texture is bothersome.
• Make available supplies and toys for writing with different media like Magnadoodle, sidewalk chalk, markers, dry erase board and markers, Handy Dandy Notebook, etc.
• Borrow from Maria Montessori and make your own sandpaper letters or buy tactile letters.
• Buy materials focusing on letter formation: wooden letter pieces with letter cards, dough letters, stamp screen, etc.

Pamela educated me about the connection between drawing and writing skills. When Blues Clues debuted in 1996, she became enamored with imitating Steve’s clues and taught herself to draw. As she began to fill pages and pages of clues, her coordination improved greatly. While she would have flatly refused to fill pages and pages of paper with letters, she found clues to be a joy! If a child has no interest in drawing, you might be able to entice them by teaching them to draw their favorite animated characters using simple shapes. I found very basic ideas in books by Ed Emberly and Usborne. I have no natural flair for art, and books like Draw Squad and Drawing with Children showed me how to move past the stick-figure stage! Thanks to her interest in Blues Clues her fine motor skills improved tremendously in just one year as you can see in the following pictures.




















Homeschoolers often worry about documenting progress and providing paperwork for the state. During our sabbatical from writing, I discovered different ways to document knowledge without loads of writing:

• Allow him to type (some find typing easier).
• For stories, have her dictate to you or into a tape recorder; you or an older child can type or write by hand.
• Develop worksheets in which he marks or points to the answers.
• For math, have her tell you what to write.
• Encourage him to draw.
• For sequencing in math, science, history, etc., place the information on separate index cards and let her sort.
• Let him set up the scene with blocks, toys, Legos, etc.
• Let her dramatize alone, with stuffed animals, or with other children the plot of a story.
• Take pictures of or film any of these if you must have documentation.