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3 Ways to Choose the BEST Writing Curriculum (for a Growing Homeschool Family)

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

It’s a scary feeling choosing a writing curriculum when you don’t have a professional background in education. Also, look at my page The Dynamics of How to Homeschool Easily and Smarter.

Knowing that thousands of parents embark on teaching their children each year, I too made the leap to choosing the perfect writing curriculum.

But you and I both know that perfect writing curriculum doesn’t exist, or does it?

3 Ways to Choose the BEST Writing Curriculum (for a Growing Homeschool Family)

Looking back now that two of my sons are graduated, there were some things I did right although I didn’t feel that way at the time.

WRITING CURRICULUM

Hoping to spare you the same agony I went through because of my aversion to teaching writing, I learned 3 ways to choose the best writing curriculum for a growing homeschool family.

1. There is a right way to teach writing. No smoke and mirrors are involved.

A writing program needs to give you and your children structure and sentence variety.

Short and compound sentences are only two sentence types, but a beginner writer needs plenty of practice developing them.

Moving from basic sentence writing to a paragraph is foundational to strong writing skills.

As your child matures, he widens out in his ability to write creatively, but the foundation is first.

Does your writing curriculum give numerous subject topics, practice with sentence variety and instructions to the non-professional educator?

2. As the moods of your children change, your writing environment can’t.

When it comes to scheduling, I could easily be known as a Nazi mama.

I’ve been hard on myself through the years so that I don’t push too hard.

But years later, I’ve learned my structured environment was key to my boys learning how to write well.

I fully appreciate now that relaxed homeschooling is not lazy homeschooling. Finding balance is key to being a good writing teacher.

A well-rounded writing curriculum should give you guidance through each step of the writing process and tips to accommodate your kids changing needs and moods.

For several years, my sons needed to write about boy topics.

Easy Writing Curriculum Tips

Getting them in touch with their warm and fuzzy feelings didn’t work for them. An excellent writing curriculum really needs to serve the needs of both girls and boys.

In my inexperience, I learned a valuable nugget which is that a structured writing environment nurtures creativity. It worked opposite of how I thought it would be in the beginning.

Instead of focusing on the grade level, a writing curriculum needs to give you a clear picture of the process.

For example, does it move from planning, prewriting, drafting, revising to editing/publish? Does it help you to teach each step clearly?

If the writing curriculum is written for multiple ages, then you can teach to the writing ability for each child.

It’s a costly mistake to buy a writing curriculum that does not give you abundant teaching tips at each stage of the writing process.

For example, just because a child is in middle school doesn’t mean he is ready to write high school essays. After all essays are just a lot of practice in paragraph writing combined to make a lengthy paper.

Practice in paragraph writing can span many grades and it’s more about maturity than age.

When you’re given clear short-term goals and long-term goals of the writing process, your child can advance based on his maturity or simmer at one level for a while.

Again, teaching writing from the novice to the accomplished is about giving kids a structured environment which should be one of the important details in your program.

Writing, like math, is a skill that needs to be practiced each day. Skipping writing for numerous days and then asking your kids to write 5 paragraphs in one setting is pure torture.

Like other skill subjects, writing quickly becomes boring if a child is not writing about what interests him.

Does your writing curriculum give you writing prompts or ideas, encourages your child to write about topics that interest him and remind you to give praise for your child’s good communication skills? It should.

3. Lessons must be geared toward ensuring writing success.

Writing programs aim for writing success, but many miss the mark.

Not having a teaching background makes me require more of a writing program than just telling me about the writing process.

Look at these key bullet points to help you gauge a top-notch writing program.

Writing Structure Gives Kids a Strong Edge

  • Equipping teachers with scripted lessons is the start to creative writing. Like cooking, not everybody needs a recipe but sometimes you need exact measurements. However, in the beginning an inexperienced cook starts with a pattern or recipe and adjusts a recipe as she hones her skill. She adjusts a recipes to fit her family’s needs. Teaching writing is similar. Learn from seasoned writers by carefully following a script and then adjust it to meet your family’s needs.
  • Providing detailed instructions for budding writers is an essential component. New writers seem to have no fear when it comes to ideas. They need structure and guidance daily. The challenges are quite different for a more mature writer.
  • A program should ensure writing success for older writers who have more experience in life but may have experienced many writing failures. They may lack confidence. If a writing program fails to ensure that each writing adventure is a success, why would you choose it?
  • Ample ideas for editing, revising and giving feedback are necessary. My boys never responded to the red pen marks on their paper. It didn’t take many times for me to do that until I realized that writing is very personal. Tips in my curriculum like discussing topics beforehand, having my child explain his thoughts to me prior to writing and having my child listen and watch me as I thought outloud while writing were key teaching points I learned.

Teaching Kids to Write Clearly and Creatively Without Crushing Them

One year when one of my sons was in middle school, I thought he was a very creative writer. At least more so than I was at his age. What I was helped to appreciate from teaching writing was that my son needed to make a point with his writing while entertaining readers.

Having eight pages of words which sparked his imagination was beautiful and creative, but honing it for meaning is equally important.

As a mom of bright boys, I refused to believe that just because boys came later to the writing table that it meant they were delayed.

They were not, they just needed more entertaining than girls. A boy’s need to wiggle, move, and use up their energy had to be incorporated into the lesson plan.

I’m not telling you that teaching writing is easy, but it can be less intimidating when you choose the best writing curriculum. Take your time choosing one and ask a lot of questions.

3 Ways to Choose the BEST Writing Curriculum (for a Growing Homeschool Family)

What is working and not working for you right now?

More Writing Curriculum Tips

Also, look at how to teach writing with these other tips.

It’s a scary feeling to choose a writing curriculum when you don’t have a professional background in education. Knowing that thousands of parents embark on teaching their children each year, I too made the leap to choosing the perfect writing curriculum. But you and I both know that perfect writing curriculum doesn’t exist, or does it? Looking back now that two of my sons are graduated, there were some things I did right although I didn’t feel that way at the time. Click here to grab the 3 tips on how to choose the BEST writing curriculum.

Don’t forget to follow BOTH of my Pinterest accounts for AWESOME pins.

Visit Tina Robertson’s profile on Pinterest.


Visit Tinas Dynamic Homeschool ‘s profile on Pinterest.

Teaching Cursive Handwriting Matters Style Doesn’t And Free Resources

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Should teaching cursive handwriting not be a priority in this digital age.

For years we have been told that storing information in digital form is safer than paper.

However, that process is not without problems.

Cursive Matters; Handwriting Style Doesn't and grab some free AWESOME resources @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

Technology is rapidly changing.

And hardware and devices, which store vital information from paper can become obsolete.

Businesses scramble to constantly update their systems as important paperwork could become lost.

Should cursive be lost to the same vacuum of the modern digital age?

It’s not easy to answer that question unless you know how to teach cursive.

If you have never taught cursive, it can be easy to cast it off.

Or think that a child is not capable of it.

Will we be doing our kids a disservice if we skip the cursive and keep the keyboard?

You may think so, but not so fast.

Is Cursive Obsolete for Homeschooled Kids?

Look first at a few of these points of how cursive should be taught to make it easy.

And more importantly the value of it.

Also, I have some free resources at the bottom for you to use to teach cursive.

It doesn’t cost a lot to get a beautiful return.

ONE/ Teach cursive first, before print.

When I taught cursive to my first son, he already had learned the ball-and-stick method that I taught him in Prek and part of Kindergarten.

Switching quickly and teaching him simplified cursive at the end of Kindergarten and in first grade were key to him successfully learning cursive.

Teaching my first son cursive, I learned that it was easier to teach him cursive first because the letters were connected and flowing.

I also learned a valuable lesson as a teacher which is to not have my son unlearn the ball-and-stick method he had been taught.

That is not the way I wanted to teach.

As he progressed, I noticed that with the ball-and-stick method that he could get confused with letter direction.

At that point, I had him do all his work, including crossword puzzles in cursive.

By the way, fun crosswords puzzles was a fun way to teach him to practice writing individual cursive letters while his attention was focused on the fun of the puzzle.

As he progressed through the years, he quickly recaptured knowing how to print and it turned out beautiful.

Master Cursive Writing @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

(My son’s cursive at the beginning of second grade so I could judge his progress.)

When my second and third sons came along, I taught them cursive first.

Their letter reversal struggle was just about non-existent because they didn’t learn to print them until they were older.

As they have progressed through the years, I find it ironic that as they have grown, they developed their own order of how to write some numbers and letters.

For example, in writing the number four, one of my sons writes the longer side first (the part on the right) and then he writes the part on the left side last.

Of course, this is opposite of how we teach our kids to print the number 4, but it’s his handwriting style.

Of course, I remind him how to form the numbers and letter easier, but I don’t fuss too much over it.

More on that in a minute.

TWO/ Understand the three broad strokes of cursive.

To understand the simple way to teach cursive, you need to know the three broad strokes.

The first is a downcurve or sometimes called up and down, an overcurve and an undercurve.

When you see how to tame cursive, it becomes very easy to allow kids to make huge curves and loops.

For our first lessons in teaching cursive, my sons wrote real big on butcher roll paper.

Understanding that most children don’t have control over their fine motor skills until about half way through first grade, I didn’t expect them to write small cursive letters.

I did allow each child to write a lot of big strokes, up and down, loops, curves and circles, which they like to do anyway.

From there we progressed to lined paper in first grade.

3 Broad Cursive Strokes to Teach

After teaching all of my sons cursive and resisting the print first tradition, which can confuse children, I learned that when letters are connected and flowing, it’s easier to learn to write.

When a child has to decide where to place straight lines and circles as he is learning the ball-and-stick method, he can get confused and write letters backward.

Cursive built confidence in my boys because when they placed their pencil on the paper on the left side of the paper for the first letter each letter flowed effortlessly.

Instead of focusing so much emphasis on down up, around, lift your pencil up, place it back down, my sons focused on their spelling not the constant placing of where to begin and end letters or lines.

Penmanship was more legible because there was no guessing which letter faced forward or backward.

THREE/ Confusion where one word starts and stops was avoided by doing cursive.

Another battle I didn’t have to face though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time was that my sons avoided the confusion of not being able to tell where one word ends and the other one begins.

This is not only important for new readers, but for anybody that wants their handwriting legible.

My sons’ reading and writing advanced quickly because cursive helped them to see which letters stayed connected to make words.

When my sons did start using printing interchangeably with cursive on some of their compositions, I noticed that some of the printed words ran together.

More Writing Curriculum Tips

It was hard to read when two words ran together because they weren’t spaced properly.

This is a common mistake for the child to guess where to start the next letter in a ball-and-stick method, which is why some words look like they have a few extra letters at the end of them when they are really the start of the next word.

What I have learned is that cursive matters because it has not only built confidence in my sons, but helped them to learn to read, spell and taught them the value of being proud of something uniquely theirs.

Each son has developed different handwriting styles that are as individual as their personality, which is another myth about cursive.

Cursive doesn’t have to be uniformed among writers.

Persons who have mastered cursive can read different styles of it.

Can Homeschools Become Part of the Dumbing Down Movement If We Don’t Teach Cursive

There is plenty of room for personality and differences. Some writers prefer more vertical writing and others prefer slanted writing, which is why handwriting style doesn’t matter because we are not trying to confine kids to a mold.

I am not telling you to not keep the keyboard, but I’m telling you that cursive goes beyond the value of teaching a child how to write well.

Free Homeschool Cursive Program and Resources

Look at some of these free resources which rock because they help you to teach cursive.

Look at my articles

Don’t forget to follow BOTH of my Pinterest accounts for more AWESOME pins.

Visit Tina Robertson’s profile on Pinterest.


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Shocking Things that Homeschooled Boys Want to Write About. Should We Let Them?

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

It was a sweet little dream.

All my boys enthusiastically sitting around our red writing desks ready to brainstorm writing genre that was moral, upright and worthy.

Shocking Things that Homeschooled Boys Want to Write About.

Flashing back to my childhood of reading The Secret Garden, Heidi and then on to my favorite, mysteries like Nancy Drew, I just knew their choice of writing topics would mesh with my ideas.

Reality set in soon when my boys mentioned gore, violence and video games.

Wait! We aren’t those types of parents.

We were raising our boys to be peace loving Christian men. Screen time was censored and movies always had to be approved and besides we never allowed things like that in our home.

Writing about blood and guts aren’t topics that I thought were appropriate to write about. And no matter what we did by not allowing them to play with guns, they would still find some way to form a gun out of a peanut butter sandwich or in one case a picture stand.

As I have learned through the years, writing topics boys want to write about are immensely different than what interest girls, including me.

Shocking Things That Homeschooled Boys Want to Write About. Should we let them @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

Understanding that boys are naturally curious about topics that are opposite my feminine personality took me a while to scrutinize.

Knowing too that what fills their minds when they take pen to paper is just as important as giving them free choice, I had to devise a plan or standard.

Six Useful Tips Teaching Homeschooled Boys to Write

I learned . .

  • That because of the fact they are boys, their minds go to different places. It means that I need to embrace the differences instead of being miffed over them;
  • I had to let go of the thinking that my feminine writing topics were superior,they are not;
  • That I can’t give them freedom of choice and then take it back the minute they exercise it;
  • That boys, like girls, do need a standard of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable;
  • That instead of writing about gore, I had to let go and let them write about games; and
  • That instead of writing about violence, write about the valor or find virtue in it.

Boys tend to hyper focus on details that are not important to me when I put on my teacher writing hat.

Instead of criticizing their details, I try to find the good in it because I know as boys they do think differently than I do.

Many times in my journey I have come across passages that my boys are suppose to focus on and model in their narratives.

For many years, I wondered why my boys just didn’t get it. I even switched writing curriculum before I could put my finger on what was the difficulty.

It wasn’t the genre they did not get, it was the undertone in the message that bored them, which was a lesson created by a woman teacher for girls.

No, not all of them were that way, but I knew my boys were just not engaged and that is a must.

To be fair, I had to think about this way.

Give a girl an assignment to write about football stats.

Do I hear shrieks of agony and moans of boring? But, that is just what I was doing with my boys. I can put myself in their boots.

Learning to take whatever elements a writing curriculum wanted my sons to write about and then giving them freedom to write what inspired them, I had more success.

No, I didn’t get why some of what they wrote and read to each other they found drop dead funny. I was the one then that felt out of place.

From that lesson, it helped me to change the way I approached writing.

I adjusted, but setting limits on some subjects. Look at some of these topics my boys find appealing and that I let them write about.

  • Video games;
  • Sports. All kinds of sports with football being my boys favorite;
  • Funny things that I don’t find particularly funny, but it’s also the topic they spend the most time on to get the details just right;
  • Describing weapons;
  • Science fiction; and yes
  • Graphic Novels too.

I have read many boy compositions and now find the humor in them because they are expressions of their inner voice.

Are you struggling with a boy writer who just does make a connection to what you want him to write about?

I hope some of these tips will help you to ditch the curriculum and teach the boy.

Boys will lead you to what topics captivate them. Will you embrace the differences?

Hugs and love ya,

 

3 Things to Avoid When Teaching Homeschooled Kids Beginning Composition

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.




Penmanship, copywork, and composition can be quite confusing understanding the purpose of each when you are new to teaching composition.

Cultivating the Creative Process

Penmanship is learning how to write and form letters, while composition is composing or crafting sentences to convey thoughts in an organized and logical way.

1. Practice does make perfect. Avoid Stop and Start.

The physical act of learning how to write comes before being able to pen words into beautiful thoughts.

The mistake made by many moms is not knowing in the beginning if your child is struggling with the actual physical act of penmanship or if it’s the actual process of of forming his thoughts down on paper in a coherent way.

You don’t know that until you sit down together and start writing.

3 Things to Avoid When Teaching Homeschooled Kids Beginning Composition @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool PlusToo, a lot of schools don’t have time to teach cursive anymore or think that writing will be obsolete soon. Assuming that your child has decent and legible handwriting before teaching composition is a common mistake.

There is nothing more frustrating for a new writer than to struggle with the physical act of writing with the added pressure of composing ideas.

2. Process over Product. Avoid Rushing the Flow of Thought Just to Put “Something” on Paper.

As I mentioned, composition is a mental process of learning how to organize thoughts and convey words that are easily understood. Handwriting is a physical process.

As you can see when a child is still struggling to write, then your expectations for a 5 paragraph essay may not be met. It is very laborious and children need a lot of encouragement.

It is important to emphasize to your child that writing is a process. Don’t assume they know that from the curriculum you are using.

Excellent composition curriculum has a way of taking them down a path to model that process, but some kids need to understand the big picture so they know what they are striving for.

Look at these steps to a good masterpiece:

  • Pre-writing;
  • drafting;
  • revising;
  • editing; and
  • publishing.

This takes time.

You can help by being consistent and choosing quality over quantity in the beginning.

It is better to write a few sentences each day than to go days without writing and then expect your child to sit down and go through the 5 step writing process.  Too, I’ve used many writing programs through the years and each one having something I needed at the time. I used WriteShop when my kids were young because it breaks the writing process down for me. In addition, an added perk for me is that it’s written by a homeschool mom. That means she understands my background is not in teaching. So plenty of hand holding, background information, and tips are given in the currriculum.

WriteShop Junior

3. Manageable Chunks. Avoid Handwriting in Areas that are not Important.

Also, cutting back writing on subjects that don’t matter like workbooks or working math problems orally will save the hand and brain power until composition time.

Copywork is also a valuable aid for any writer and not just new writers.

Is Writing Obsolete?

Copywork means to learn by mimicking good writers and copying short passages.

This trains the child to see and hear how well crafted passages, verses and prose should flow.

It is not meant to keep your child busy, but it is about him taking his time and learning by copying great writers of the past.

The mechanics of writing like punctuation is another part of learning to write correctly.

A visual picture of where commas, periods, and capitals are placed in the sentence helps your child to pay attention to the details in his writing.

WriteShop Primary

Understanding the basics of composition will help you to avoid common mistakes of teaching beginning composition.

What do you think? Have you already started to make a few of these mistakes?

Look at these other tips:

Hugs and love ya,

Check out these posts too:

Teaching Handwriting When Schooling the Early Years Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

Why It Is Hard to Teach Homeschooled Kids Writing But Not Impossible

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Today, in sharing why it is hard to teach homeschooled kids writing but not impossible I will share some background information on how to teach writing. Also, look at my page The Dynamics of How to Homeschool Easily and Smarter for more tips!

First, let me tell you my story.

In public school, I had a middle school teacher that I adored.

She understood my preference of communicating orally where I could look into the eyes of the person I was talking to, give them a gentle pat or flail my arms out long when talking fast.

But she also encouraged me to give my written words the same gravity.

It wasn’t until I started teaching my boys how to write that I truly appreciated what a difficult task it is to teach my boys how to write.

Understanding the process of any skill that I am teaching has always helped me to find a solution to any problem we are experiencing.

More importantly, I have a direction to follow.

For example, it’s easy enough to understand that when teaching reading we need to start with a set of letters that express sounds.

After that, we build words, sentences and we are off to teaching our kids how to read.

Finding a starting point for writing, however, can be more elusive.

Why It is Hard to Teach Homeschooled Kids Writing But Not Impossible @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

Word Writing Scramble

One reason I found writing hard to teach was that I didn’t appreciate that it is a learned art to fashion words on a page that are appealing.

It’s almost like playing word scramble or in this case sentence scramble when teaching our kids to write.

Immature readers can create awkward sounding sentences because of their lack of experience in life.

For that matter, awkward sentence that don’t flow smoothly can happen to even the most experienced writer too.

That is why it is important in the early stages of writing that children have plenty of time to mull over words, thoughts and arrangement of ideas.

Ideas like creating and writing in daily journals, playing word games and vocabulary games are important to arming children with the creativity they need to write.

When I started teaching writing, my oldest son felt almost paralyzed when I would ask him what topic he wanted to write about.

That was my first ugly encounter with writing after teaching him how to write his ABCs.

Mature Writers Born?

I taught him how to write his ABCs, how could this not be just as easy or so I thought.

My next mess up came because I was expecting maturity and experience with writing topics from a 5 year old.

Experiences and maturity come just from that, age and life experiences.

How could I equip my 5 year old with opportunities for writing experiences?

It is the same answer that equipped him at 15 years old, which is reading to the rescue.

I had heard many times that a reader is a writer and we read every day.

But other than pleasure and reading to find out what we wanted to know about, I under estimated the value of it in gaining experiences outside of what we were learning each day.

There was a connection between the books we were reading and writing topics that swirled around in my son’s mind.

I didn’t have to rush childhood, nor would I want to so that he could learn the art of self-expression.

Drawing out of him experiences that he read about either in his books and daily living were the keys to overflowing topic ideas.

Are You Making this Mistake?

There is just no rushing content, facts, ideas and details, which is the foundation of writing.

Content is the next biggie that kids are afraid of.

As if struggling with the structure of creating delightful sounding words is not enough, they have to think about content, topic sentences, details and a strong conclusion.

There is no getting around it, our kids needs our expertise when it comes to helping them with their writing.

In the early stages of writing especially, our kids need us to supply content and it is okay to do this.

We don’t want to ever put our kids in a sink or swim situation when writing.

It does absolutely no good and it can create a kid who hates writing and carries that feeling to high school.

It is important to continue these building skills through to middle school.

That is the time to continue to reinforce what was learned at the foundational level and to hone outlining and note taking skills.

Though I didn’t know as much then when I started teaching my kids to write as I know now, I did know that certain valuable skills could not be overlooked.

Look at these basic things to include in teaching everyday writing.

  • Copywork
  • Dictation
  • Outlining
  • Constantly reading back what they wrote
  • Journal writing to not be corrected but to use as practice for self-expression.

More Homeschool Handwriting Curriculum Tips!

Keep reading for a list of 8 handwriting curriculum and the benefits of each.