Lack of Writing Interest and a Change in Assignments

February 1, 2016

We are still struggling with attitudes that came home with each of the children in varying degrees from public school about writing.  Mostly, a general feeling of it's difficult and not fun and a major lack of understanding when it comes to knowing how to go about writing even a basic paragraph.  What I didn't expect was for science TV to pay off today when it came to writing and attitudes.

When I let the kids sit and watch an animal documentary for science one day last week I didn't think much of it at the time.  They picked 72 Dangerous Animals of Australia and while I don't consider that particular show to be the most educational I figured they were learning something and I was catching up on grading papers so win, win.

Today however it paid dividends two-fold.  No one liked the writing topic from our lesson book today which was a descriptive paragraph about something you like to eat at lunch time.  So I gave in and told them to write a descriptive paragraph about one of the 72 animals they learned about last week.  Suddenly they were excited and couldn't quit talking about which animal they were writing about about and everything they had learned about it while watching the show.  I was frankly amazed at just how much they actually remembered.  Needless to say I am grateful for the inspiration today with a simple solution to our anti-writing attitudes.