Writing with Ease: Strong Fundamentals - Instructor Text

The Complete Writer: Writing with Ease

by Susan Wise Bauer

Young students who learn to write well need one-on-one instruction—something which your child's classroom may not offer. In The Complete Writer series, Susan Wise Bauer turns every parent into a writing teacher. No experience is needed. Drawing on her fifteen years of experience in teaching writing, Susan lays out a carefully-designed sequence of steps that will teach every student to put words on paper with ease and grace. This alternative plan for teaching writing combines the best elements of old-fashioned writing instruction with innovative new educational methods—and explains why so many writing programs fail.

Designed for elementary-aged writers and for older students who still struggle, Writing With Ease builds a sturdy foundation of basic skills for grades 1–4 (or levels 1–4 for the older student who needs more work) all in the same book. Diagnostic tests within the book will help the parent to determine where the child needs to start and which workbook the child will need. You can use the text by itself as a guide, then choose your own copywork and dictation; or you can buy the workbooks (available separately), which do all the work for you. Each workbooks will cover one grade. This Instructor Text covers grades 1-4 in 144 lessons, 4 explanatory chapters, and 4 appendices.

Genres: Writing, Education, Nonfiction, School, Reference, Parenting, Language

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 2008

About the author

Susan Wise Bauer is an American author, English instructor of writing and American literature at The College of William and Mary, and founder of Well-Trained Mind Press (formerly Peace Hill Press).

Reviews

[Sally Linford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I left this review on Amazon:

Susan Bauer's opening essay on the writing process and how to teach it is the most cogent, informed explanation I've ever read:

"Writing is a process that involves two distinct mental steps. First, the writer puts an idea into words; then, she puts the words down on paper.

INARTICULATE IDEA ---> IDEA IN WORDS
IDEA IN WORDS ---> WORDS ON PAPER

. . . The pianist practices first the right hand, and then the left hand, before putting the two together; the young writer practices putting ideas into words, and then putting words down on paper, before trying to do both simultaneously. . . What follows will equip you to train the young student in the language of writing."

And Bauer delivers on this promise perfectly; she shows even the most unprepared parent or teacher how to teach good writing in just a few minutes a day. Her program will be a great relief to students who feel overwhelmed by writing assignments. It's all so manageable: she even tells you exactly what to do if you're starting with a "reluctant older student(grade 6-12)."

To make her case, her own writing is so easy and delightful that it's relaxing to read. I'm ordering the workbooks.

Thank you, Ms Bauer.
_____

My off-the-record comment:
Susan Bauer ROCKS! I want to BE her.

(I guess I should say, "I want to be SHE," but that sounds goofy. So, if Shakespeare can get away with "Woe is me," I'm sticking with I WANT TO BE HER!

[Catherine Gillespie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bauer is a professor at William & Mary, which is a rigorous school (my little brother went there!), but she notes that increasing numbers of her students are abysmal writers. In looking into why, Bauer unpacks the component skills required for good writing, and considers the best way to build those pieces in a way that will not frustrate the child. She notes that prematurely asking kids to combine handwriting, sentence structure, analysis, and composition organization is not a good idea, because except in the case of the (few) naturally gifted writers out there, this approach will only create kids who hate writing, or kids who think they know how to write but who are actually terrible at it or have no sense of style.

Rather, Bauer’s study led her to conclude that the classical and Charlotte Mason approaches of emphasizing narration, dictation, and copywork in the early elementary years, then moving into deep understanding of sentence composition and connecting style and thought in compositions in upper elementary and middle school, and finally working on building style in high school work best.

{Read my full review here}

[Shelby Rollenhagen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read through this quickly. This is a great education supplement. Whether you intend on designing your own curriculum or using Bauer's premade supplies, she lays out the importance of each step and what each foundational layer needs to accomplish and why.

Teaching High School, I have seen those missing gaps for myself. I also have seen them in my own children based on our standard education system.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

It feels like cheating to say I “read” this book because the reading part is so short, but I need to keep track of things so here we are.

I really appreciated the sort of birds-eye approach to what teaching writing looks like as a whole if you are using a narration and copywork and dictation approach, as opposed to a traditional homeschool curriculum that has kids start doing original writing at a young age. I’m already using two of the Writing With Ease workbooks to help homeschool a friend’s second and fourth graders, but the curriculum choice wasn’t mine so I kind of just got thrown into it. I read this to get a better overview and so I could decide what to do for my first grader.

My experience with the workbooks has been that it’s nice to have it all laid out for you, but I don’t always like their choice of dictation sentences (some have an absurd number of hard-to-spell names that I don’t think necessarily have benefit to the student) and that I’m not sure how much the mechanical questioning approach actually helps scaffold their narration. It seems more like busywork. I think some of it might come from the fact that I have some differences of opinion with classical approaches.

With that said, I did like how she laid out the overall ideas in this book, and it’s helpful how they show how to gradually increase the length of copywork and when to introduce dictation, and I do like that at first they have the child copy the sentence one day before hearing it in dictation the next, which helps them already have it in mind and work up to the harder job of writing down dictation of something they’ve never seen.

[Gold Dust · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book to instruct parents and/or teachers on how to educate kids to be good writers.

1. Copywork. Ask kid questions about what she read. Order events chronologically.
2. Verbal Dictation. Ask kid to summarize what was just read to her. Order things in order of importance.
3. Kid tells u the narration of a book, you write it down, then read the sentences back to the kid.
4. Kid comes up with their own sentences to write.
5. Sentence diagramming
6. Outlining other people’s writing: science and history, never fiction
7. Outlining original ideas
8. Research papers writing about other people’s works.
9. Persuasive opinionated Essay writing. Good theses: comparing & contrasting, explaining why, when.
10. Write 3-5 1 page papers per week. This is better than 2-3 long papers per year.
11. Long papers can be done in the last 2 years of high school.


“Until you know what you think and believe, and can explain why you believe it, you remain immature” (16).

“It is absurd to hold that a man should be ashamed of inability to defend himself with his limbs, but not ashamed of an inability to defend himself with speech and reason; for the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.” - Aristotle

[Deann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the 2015 printing. I have and use in our homeschool the 4 levels of workbooks. They are wonderful themselves, but I had the desire to understand the mechanics a bit more. Writing With Ease Strong Fundamentals provides just that. This book will be helpful in pinpointing exactly where my child needs more practice, and allow me to obtain that from our other studies. There is some information on the next two stages of writing in middle and high school so the reader understands what we're moving towards. For the price, I wish there was more to this book, but if you use this instead of the workbooks it will hold much more value. I'm still glad to have the book, especially as I move more towards individualized lessons.

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

I borrow this book on a whim with the hope that it would give me tips to help my children's writing. While I can edit for style, I cannot teach young children the basic building blocks of writing in a manner that my kids would understand. However, this book gives me ideas based on the appropriate age level as well as exercise to help them improve the basic skills such as copywork and narration, later dictation. While I don't think this is the end all be all, it definitely gives me additional methods to keep in my proverbial bag of tricks that I can use if it should be appropriate for each of my children.

[Meredith Henning · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is actually really nicely laid out. I really like pretty much all that Bauer has to offer, so I'm not surprised that I like this one as well. I will use bits and pieces of it to round out Matthias' and Seamus' grammar lessons. I really like how she breaks down the copywork, dictation and narration into small pieces. For a beginning home eucator, this would make an excellent foray into these methods! Very CM with a classical tilt :)

[Allyson]

I'm hoping to use this for TyTy. He was late to read so we are just beginning the process of learning to write now. He hates writing at the moment and still struggles with simple things like capitalizing the first word in a sentence or proper nouns, and punctuation. I love Bauer's Story of the World series and this series comes highly recommended by one of my homeschooling friends who has five boys.

[Gem Esprey]

I can see the basis for this and respect the ideals of the plan. In practice, after a full school day, I'm not sure how it would go down. However, I shall be thinking about the principles of copy work and dictation with more fun projects such as writing letters and stories or sentences from her favourite books, which is more likely to engage my daughter. Also, I shall think more carefully about the questions I ask her when we are reading together. A good read but very structured.

[Saraelizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in researching what writing curriculum to use for oldest daughter next year. I like her ideas of narration, copywork, and dictation for the early years. This author always does a good job of laying it all out for the parent to see exactly how it would be done. I like that for starting out until I get comfortable enough to do my own thing.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the opening essay in this book. We've had some visual perception issues here and Bauer's plan reinforces the training "prescription" recommended to me for my child. I borrowed the book from the library, but now plan to purchase it. The author has done all the copywork selections for me and that - in and of itself - it worth it.

[Liz Busby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good writing curriculum. I've never thought about the two steps involved in writing--forming thoughts that can be written, and writing them in correct form--as two things you could teach separately. Turns out there was a reason old-school schools taught dictation. We should bring it back, I think.

[TheRose · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm currently researching English/Writing curricula, and this is the one I've decided on. Its scope is exactly what I've been looking for!

[Juliana Lyon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This IS a good program. It just gets a little monotonous...

[Ellen]

Jenni has this

[Jennifer]

We won't be using this curriculum this year, but it looks like an easy way to help with the mechanics of writing.

[Alisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on teaching beginning writing skills to children. I highly recommend it.