From listening to Mr. Pudewa's lectures and workshops, it is clear he identifies himself with the Classical method of teaching. I can't say I understand it completely but I've heard the buzz words like "rhetoric" and "trivium." He does make a point in one of his workshops about the difficulty of fitting in teaching writing on top of all the other things we try to get through in a school day and that is would be better to incorporate writing with another subject like science or history. Sounds like a unit study to me!
Now that Fritz is very familiar with the process of key word outlines and reworking a paragraph based on that outline it is very easy to fit writing into our science studies. We are currently studying Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day. The optional workbook has plenty of spaces for writing paragraphs about what we've learned. In the past I would have just picked a sentence or two from our reading and treated the exercise more like copywork. Now I can select a paragraph and have him create the outline. We can work on our rewritten paragraph on a separate sheet of paper and add the dress ups. Then he can write the final draft in his workbook.
Now we've covered our writing assignment without making it a separate lesson. I also think the note-taking exercise is helping him retain the science facts.
No comments:
Post a Comment