Institute for Excellence in Writing

This year I decided to add Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) to our curriculum. We are doing Level B. At first, the kids were not looking forward to this. Ellie said she already knew how to write. Josh just groaned!

On the day of our first lesson I told the kids we were going to start out by watching a 30 minute presentation on the DVD. They gasped and sighed and couldn't imagine having to sit for that long and watch some boring thing about writing. Not too long into the lesson, the kids started chuckling and laughing. They found Mr. Pudewa to be entertaining. When the lesson was over and I turned off the DVD, they went right on to do the required writing without any complaining.

Over the course of the first quarter, both kids have done very well with the program. They still have a little trouble narrowing their words down for their key word outlines, but they have done well with including all necessary elements into their paragraphs. Occasionally Josh will struggle with figuring out how to include a who/which clause. I will find a sentence that lends itself to using this type of clause and see if he can come up with something on his own. If he still has trouble, I'll get him started. Both kids chose to type their final product and I have taught them the MLA format to get them used to doing it that way.

I have been talking about using this for quite some time and I'm glad I finally committed to doing it. The kids find the lessons easy to follow with Mr. Pudewa's fun personality even though they are about 30 minutes long. The assignments themselves do not take too long to complete and I have not had any groaning when they see what the day's work is. Both kids are also beginning to realize they use many of the "Dress Ups" without even realizing it. I am confident this will help them very much in the future. I very much recommend this program. I am looking forward to using the other history and literature based lessons in the years to come.