Apples of Gold Home School News

Being a writer, has in ways, made it difficult for me to teach writing to my kids. I have to admit that I obsess about teaching them to write. I actually back off of it a little because I don't want them to think I expect them to become writers. Kinda weird. But, that confession made,  I'm going to share my experience with you and maybe it'll spark some ideas for teaching writing in your homeschool -- maybe not.

For me, the best thing is that I've been able to easily assess my kids' strengths and weaknesses. That's the writer advantage. If writing isn't one of your strengths or you don't necessarily enjoy writing, you might struggle with that. But that doesn't mean you can't teach them to write. When you read what they've written, learn to read it with an eye to the basics. --Should I be pausing here (punctuation)? Does this thought tie in with everything around it (unnecessary information)? Is it interesting to read (strong nouns, lively verbs)?-- My daughter, for instance, has a terrible time with run-on sentences and sentence fragments. That's what we're going to mostly work to cure next year.

When my kids were young, we stuck to grammar curriculums and writing simple book reports and stories. My kids were also frequently asked to give oral reports of what they'd learned in science, history, etc., or to give speeches. That helped them learn to organize thoughts and information. Yes, I do believe in learning how to diagram sentences! I never learned to understand diagramming well until my kids started Rod and Staff's English program. (They called it Rot & Stuff. LOL!) But I saw my own writing improve by learning all that diagramming vicariously as I taught them. It will help them to become better writers, too.

As for other writing, the adage of "write what you know" has really been the best piece of advice for me with teaching (and occasionally prodding) my kids to write. I could add to that by saying "write what you enjoy!"

My boys, of course, loved adventure. So I tried to give them prompts that were fraught with something adventurous or something outdoorsy that they could relate to, like a canoe trip gone frantically wrong (10 year old boys surviving alone in the wilderness, and all that). Sometimes I'd have them write their real life hunting and fishing tales which we'd put into a booklet with photographs. One of them has loved ornithology since he was 5, so much of his writing was done in a bird-watching journal. Strangely, he claims he never liked writing, but he's become a very succinct orator, has a strong vocabulary, and when he had job which required him to submit a report each day, he was complimented on his thoroughness!

My recent graduate is a fantasy/Lord of the Rings/dragons and warriors kind of guy. He, I have to admit, was easiest to get to write because he has an unceasing imagination. He never balked at any writing assignments because they came easy to him. At 14 he set out to write a fantasy adventure which became a novella over the course of the school year. With him I worked on editing and re-writes. We learned to proof read to make his writing tighter and stronger, as well as correcting spelling and punctuation errors. I think that if you have a child who likes to write at all, then do yourself a favor and turn him or her loose on a project that means something to them -- a novel, short story, collection of poems, a scientific paper -- something that they'll cherish, and doesn't signify more busy-work.

I tried to get my kids to do "research papers", but other than learning how to find information (which is so easy and natural to them with the internet) and then organizing it, we haven't spent a lot of time on these. If kids don't enjoy their subject matter, then it's questionable that they'll really care about learning the writing process.

I also had them occasionally write position/argument papers. I've seldom required great length from these papers. I just ask for them to be thorough. If it takes 1 page or 10, that's up to them as long as they're not being lazy about it. My goal is for them to become good communicators -- which, of course, doesn't necessarily equal wordiness (note the Gettysburg Address). If your child is planning to take the ACT Writing Assessment or some similar test, then you might check out the sample papers in the study guides you can acquire for these tests. These can be good guides for writing this type of essay, and they will give you some sort of notion of the types of questions asked on these tests (which are occasionally not the type of questions that homeschoolers would ever worry about -- "should schools require the wearing of uniforms by students...?":dry:)

Lastly, I think it's important for my high-schoolers, especially those close to graduation, to know how to write a resume. This becomes a senior project. They might also help write their transcripts and write real or sample letters of application to colleges.

Think of how writing relates to real life. Consider where life might be taking them. These days, nearly every job requires a level of ability to communicate well. People have to know how to get their ideas and opinions across to others. Develop a plan for your child that best accomplishes this.