Teaching number 1 son: It's all about process

Dear James, Daniel and Emily,

James is in third grade.  I remember third grade, I hated third grade.  I went from the freedom of a bizarre hippy free school with young hip teachers, to the rigors of a normal public school with an old, very rigid teacher.  Most of all I hated the fact that while I was able to read at a much higher level than most of my class mates I was stuck in the basics along with everyone else, repeating the same boring lessons over and over.  You might expect me to now say thanks for that repetition, that I learned a valuable lesson.  That would be incorrect, I am still bitter about all that and felt that I could have developed more as a writer with a different process.  But that last word is the key: process.

This year James has been handed some true writing assignments for home work.  And while the boy will blaze through his math homework like a house on fire (save for the tendency to miss/skip parts of the instructions), writing is a different problem.  We have tried different tacks.  Kim is not a writer, and just isn't comfortable helping him with it, so it falls to me to handle most of these assignments (which I don't mind, she'll get hers when his math advances to a certain level). 

This week I tried to get him to break down the assignment (a book report) into different components and tackle each one on separate days.  That didn't work very well, because I didn't do a very good job of explaining the components to him so he really knew what he had to do each day.  So last night we had to essentially do the whole thing in 1 night, not exactly easy for either of us.  After he was done I sat down and wrote out the steps, and what they meant, and had him read that and sign it, so he knows what I mean when I tell him he has to perform step 1 on Sunday.  Here are the steps:

1. Building Blocks
• Read a book if it is a book report
• Take Notes about the article, book, or idea
• Come up with the introductory sentence
• Come up with wrap up sentence
2. Framing the House
• Take each note and make it into a sentence
• Organize the sentences into a coherent order
• Write the rough draft
• Read the draft out loud at least once
3. Finishing touches
• Check spelling in rough draft
• Make certain title and other assignment requirements are written
• Write the final draft
• Review final draft: spelling, read out loud.

Does that work for everything? For everything he will ever write? no. And there are lots of implied pieces in some of the steps that could have been spelled out as well, but I wanted to stick to the essentials.  The thing is James is a very logical kid, he really enjoys these computer games that are all about starting small, acquiring pieces, and using those pieces to make himself bigger and stronger.  So I figured that this was the best approach, show him that writing these reports used the same idea of taking a number of small pieces and gradually stringing them together.  How this works going forward I can't say for sure, but I hope that this will at least make it easier on us parents as far as setting goals and tasks each night for home work to avoid nights like last night.