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Home : 2002 : January : 14

Been There
By s

I don't have any advice for you, because I have the same problem. I teach fifth grade to two different groups of kids. One class had HORRIBLE writing skills. So I worked very hard to design all kinds of lessons to teach
them writing and grammar skills. We've done DOL, worksheets, note-taking, little projects, and tests. All of these activities seemed to show that they were making progress. However, in the high-pressure world of writing, they have too much to think about and revert back to old ways. I felt just as bad as you did when I discovered this. But when I talked to the sixth grade teacher,

she said her kids couldn't write either. She said she knew that other teachers had tried to teach these kids, too, but that they had just not gotten it. She made me feel like I would not be blamed as a teacher for these students' shortcomings. I hope that conversations with your colleagues yield similarly comforting findings.