My HONEST Writing With Ease Review

Are you thinking about purchasing and using Writing With Ease for your child(ren). Before you do, I encourage you to read this Writing With Ease review. {This is NOT a sponsored post. This is just me sharing a my honest opinion of Writing With Ease, which my 2nd grader has been required to use the first part of this schoolyear in his homeschooling classes.}

My HONEST Writing with Ease Review - This Reading Mama

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My Honest Writing With Ease Review

I know it seems strange to throw in a Writing with Ease review right after Christmas, but I’ve had some time to really think about it over the break and I want to share my thoughts before they fly away.

I’d first like to start with what I DO like about Writing with Ease.

I love that Writing With Ease gets parents reading aloud to children. I think as children begin to read more on their own, it can be tempting to put down the read alouds. But older kids need read alouds, too!

classics introduced in Writing with Ease

The text selection of the read alouds has turned us on to many of the classics, like Doctor Dolittle and Pippi Longstocking. It truly is a great selection.

If you have a child who struggles to write, Writing with Ease may be a good fit. I listened as the author herself explained how she purposefully separated 1- thinking about what you what to write and 2- the actual act of writing down thoughts. Combining these two skills can be difficult for some writers, so this model might be helpful with that. {I still wouldn’t use it as my main source of teaching writing.}

With Writing With Ease, the child gets to see the adult model some writing each week. {I will say this is most effective if the adult knows how to make the most out of modeling writing to the child.}

Now, here’s what I DON’T like about Writing with Ease.

{You may disagree with me on several points and that’s okay. Just keep your comments thoughtful, as I will delete anything that’s not so thoughtful.}

Writing With Ease puts writing in a nice, neat package. There’s narration, copywork, and dictation. Nice and neat. That would be great if this is actually how writing really worked. Real writing is not a linear process. Most of the time, it’s not nice and neat {even for “real” authors}. And that’s okay! It can still be taught in a thoughtful, purposeful, organized manner to help even the most reluctant of writers learn and enjoy the process of writing.

It’s highly scripted. This might be a plus for you, but not for me. Instead of empowering me, I felt it “dumbed down” the art of teaching writing.

Where’s the creative writing? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but kids have great ideas. They have amazing imaginations. Why not let them use it in their writing? Instead of telling them everything they have to write, why not let them show us? The same exact skills can be taught using their creative writing that are taught with the copywork and dictation. The inability to express his own thoughts began to frustrate my 2nd grader and he began to hate writing time. {Of course, all kids are different.}

The copywork. Oh, the copywork. As you may have read before, I’m not a huge fan of traditional copywork. And while copywork has its place in teaching writing, I don’t think it’s first place. There are just so many other creative and meaningful ways to teach the same, exact skills.

I struggle with the idea of asking kids to summarize the read alouds. Summarizing requires kids to use lots of comprehension strategies all at once and is actually very difficult for most readers. If you are using Writing with Ease with a struggling writer who already has a hard time putting thoughts together, the summarizing may be a great source of frustration. {I do like that there are questions to help your child summarize, but it can still be very difficult.}

I do not believe that the dictation sentences included in each lesson are developmentally appropriate. I’ve used diction sentences for years, but not for teaching writing. I’ve used them for teaching spelling. If dictation is the focus of the lesson, the words kids are being asked to spell within those sentences should not be so difficult. After all, from my understanding, kids should not be allowed to use invented spellings in this model.

So, there you have it. If all my cons don’t bother you and you’d like to use Writing with Ease, more power to ya! But as for me and my house, we’re not using it anymore.

If you want to see a sample of how I teach writing, be sure to check out these posts: