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Writing and Homeschool


I say "writing", but I'm really going to cover our whole language arts set-up.

The core of our writing curriculum is "Writing With Ease" for our younger kids and "Writing With Skill" for our older kids. They both are by Susan Wise Bauer of The Well Trained Mind.

There are a couple things that I really love about this curriculum. The first is that, like our math curriculum, it's a "gentle" curriculum. The student doesn't learn a giant concept all at once and then have to practice it for days. Instead, each day they will learn a small part of a new concept and keep using that new skill or concept, slowly building on it. I also really appreciate how it doesn't have any worksheets. In the younger grades, the kids learn what a noun, verb, etc, is by actually reading or writing sentences and then finding the assigned part of a sentence in their own writing. So they really are integrating what they learn with what they are actually using to write. In the older grades, it's the same thing. They learn what a preposition is by using it in their own writing. There's never a day or week where they learn how to use commas, etc. Instead, it's a consistent skill they hone by using it. One of my other favorite things about this curriculum is that is is fantastic for kids with different learning disabilities. Our kids are all over the place with their academic strengths and some severe learning disabilities and this curriculum has consistently worked great for all of them. In the younger grades, it has really been a challenge for a child with auditory processing issues, but without being frustrating. Instead, it has significantly worked for this child and we've seen amazing improvements in auditory processing abilities (combined with our critical thinking workbooks which will be in another blog post). This curriculum is also very, very user friendly for kids with dyslexia or late readers/writers. Your child doesn't have to be able to read or write to start with Writing With Ease. It relies solely on narration at first, meaning the student doesn't write anything his/herself. He or she will tell the parent and the parent writes for him or her, helping the student learn how to organize his/her thoughts. For some of my kids this moves too slowly and I do start assigning them to write what they would normally be narrating to me. Likewise, for the dictation exercises (where the parent reads one to three sentences to the child and the child writes them) can be too much for a late writer or child with dyslexia, so I will narrow it down to a shorter sentence, or change those to the child copying the sentences, or just push them off until he or she is ready. In the older grades, I love that there is at least a weekly writing assignment (often times more often). There will be frequent short writing projects with regular longer papers. They are never turned loose to write an entire paper start to finish on their own before they're ready. Instead the workbook walks them through the steps to writing a paper one day at a time. For example, day one will be choosing which facts you want to include. Day two will be organizing those facts into an outline. Day three will walk the child through writing an introductory paragraph. Day four will be expanding the outline into the body of the paper. By the end of the week, the student will have written an 800 word science paper without being overwhelmed.

Spelling we integrate into their daily writing by spell checking the older kids' work and they correct any words spelled wrong. (For the younger kids I never correct spelling in an assignment that is focusing on content rather than structure, because it can be too frustrating for them to try to get out their thoughts while also focusing on correct spelling or grammar and I never want to make writing a frustrating experience for them.) We also do weekly spelling lists that I choose based on online word lists of suggested spelling words. The younger grades, I try to group together spelling "rules" into each list. (All words that end in -ck one week, words that end in -tion another, etc.) On Mondays they write each spelling word in a sentence, on Tuesday practice spelling each word 3 times on paper, on Wednesday writing each word in cursive 3 times, and on Thursday practicing spelling the words out loud to each other. Spelling test on Friday. Any words they get wrong, they write ten times to practice them some more and they may end up on another spelling list. All my kids love to read or be read to, though a lot of them enjoy non fiction more than fiction. We always have two books that we are reading out loud together as a family. One will be historical and either fiction or nonfiction, and the other will be a work of fiction that is "just for fun". (Right now we're reading The Penderwicks by Jane Birdsall and we are laughing so hard through it. I love this book and highly recommend it!)

So that's what we do for language arts in a (very large) nutshell. :)

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