Homeschooling help and encouragement from experienced homeschoolers - find out how homeschooling works and how to start, get tips & ideas for when things need adjusting, read curriculum reviews before buying, learn how online schools work, gain confidence about homeschooling high school, and more.
The December writing prompt calendar is full of winter and holiday-themed writing prompts. Each month we are offering writing prompts (you will be able to find them all on the main Homeschool Writing Prompts page), and you can download our December-themed prompts below. Continue reading »
This month’s calendar is full of autumn- and Thanksgiving-themed writing prompts, including menu planning for Thanksgiving dinner and leftovers. Each month we are offering writing prompts (you will be able to find them all on the main Homeschool Writing Prompts page), and you can download our November-themed starters here. Continue reading »
The May writing prompts calendar focuses on picnics, moms, and Memorial Day. Each month we are offering writing prompts (you will be able to find them all on the main Homeschool Writing Prompts page), and you can download our May-themed prompts below. Continue reading »
The April writing prompts calendar focuses on food – lots and lots of fun food. Since April is also National Poetry Month, you may want to have your student answer some of the prompts in the form of poetry. Each month we are offering writing prompts (you will be able to find them all on the main Homeschool Writing Prompts page), and you can download our April-themed prompts below. Continue reading »
The March writing prompts calendar focuses on favorite foods, pets, colors, rainbows, and–of course–St. Patrick. Each month we are offering writing prompts (you will be able to find them all on the main Homeschool Writing Prompts page), and you can download our March-themed prompts below. Continue reading »
The February writing prompt calendar focuses on favorite books, love, and poetry writing prompts. Each month we are offering writing prompts (you will be able to find them all on the main Homeschool Writing Prompts page), and you can download our February-themed prompts here. Continue reading »
The January writing prompt calendar focuses on goals, memories, travel, and winter-themed writing prompts. Each month we are offering writing prompts (you will be able to find them all on the main Homeschool Writing Prompts page), and you can download our January-themed prompts below. Continue reading »
This month’s calendar is full of autumn-themed writing prompts with some creative story-starters included. Each month we are offering writing prompts (you will be able to find them all on the main Homeschool Writing Prompts page), and you can download our October-themed starters here. Continue reading »
Journaling is a great writing activity because it’s very adaptable. Journal prompts are only limited by your imagination. A great extension of journaling is writing a day in the life story. Homeschooling families make excellent and interesting subjects–there’s always something going on… Continue reading »
Children’s minds are bubbling over with stories — funny stories, anecdotes about life going on around them, recaps of play dates with friends, and tall tales that grow taller by the minute. As a long-time homeschool mom, it was my job to tap into those bubbles of creativity and help my children put words to those amazing stories. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Continue reading »
Your child can’t hold a pencil very well? Your child thinks faster than she can write? Your child’s handwriting is illegible? Your child can’t compose in writing even though he can tell you a great story?
Your child might benefit from having a scribe. Continue reading »
“Bring me bad writing,” I told my two homeschool co-op classes of middle school and elementary age writers. “Incorrect writing, wrong apostrophes, sentence fragments, typos, passive voice. Horrible stuff. Bring it.”
The next week, they marched in with an array of bad writing they’d found on websites, on convenience store signs, on gas pumps, in a letter from a college administrator, in text books, in novels, and in their own journals.
They had snapped photos, hand copied passages, bookmarked pages, and printed screen shots. Continue reading »
Part I of Homeschool High School Composition gives an overview of how to approach teaching homeschool composition. It is important to read it before using the assignments below, since it is a different perspective for teaching composition. Below are the assignments for composition using this part-to-whole process. The assignments use the UNC Writing Center’s free online resources.
If you would like to download the assignments, we have them as a PDF download here: Homeschool High School Composition Continue reading »
The Writing Center at UNC has put together a large collection of writing resources for college writing that are excellent tools for teaching homeschool high school composition. The center’s downloads and videos offer detailed explanations about research, sourcing, organization, editing and proofreading, voice, fallacies, thesis statements, and dozens of other writing topics. The resources are arranged alphabetically, making them easy to find by topic but not offering much in the way of an orderly progression for teaching. The following is a suggested order of study for using the resources for composition for a homeschooled high school student. In our case, we used this for a literature composition, but literature compositions can be the most difficult type to write. It might be more effective to initially use the process with a topic of choice instead of an essay on a particular book. Continue reading »
Sometimes in homeschooling, it just takes the right tool to make the biggest impact. Well, I’ve found one that has completely transformed writing for our family.
Writing is often a skill that challenges many students, because even if they have a strong command of grammar, it can be challenging to put words together in a way that is persuasive, interesting, and impactful. Even worse – many students struggle to summarize from sources when they are doing research, without plagiarizing the original source. Simply understanding source documents can also be daunting for many children, when they are introduced to research writing. Continue reading »
Some of my favorite children’s books are also wonderful learning resources you can use instead of curriculum. Among these are the oversize children’s classics about mythology by the d’Aulaires. The D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths and the D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths delighted all my kids when they were pre-readers through their late elementary years, and I found that the understanding of mythology they learned from these books persisted through their middle school and high school years, when they needed to spot and comprehend literary allusions to mythology. Continue reading »
A new year has arrived for our homeschool co-op, and I’m delighted to have a new bunch of kids to write with. Last year, I led ongoing weekly writing workshops for our high schoolers and middle schoolers. This quarter, I get to work with our elementary age writers. This gave me a chance to get started with my unorthodox approach to helping kids with their writing. Continue reading »
A great project for the New Year is making a calendar with your little ones. I’m talking about making a calendar the old fashioned way, using fresh heavy art paper and your favorite combination of markers, colored pencils, oil pastels, or other media. I first got this idea from the Oak Meadow first grade curriculum, a Waldorf-inspired curriculum which I loosely followed from time to time and adapted for other ages as my family grew. Continue reading »
My co-op kids have had fun with the warm-up we often do for our homeschool writers group. Before we begin writing and critiquing, we warm up with oral word games. In our writers group, by the time we’ve finished with the word warm-ups, the ice is broken, and the linguistic gears are well-oiled. We’re ready to settle down to read our poetry and short stories and practice offering precise and supportive critiques of what each of us has written. Continue reading »
I have always said that excellent writing is the key to success in almost any subject. With a 9th grader in the house this year, we are focusing on writing, writing, and more writing. Initially, we are working on putting together all of the things we’ve studied up to this point: grammar, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, organization, and concision. Putting it all together into a written assignment can be overwhelming, so I came up with a self-editing writing checklist for my daughter to use. I was looking for a little more practice in writing mechanics when Time4Writing offered us a chance to try out their High School Writing Mechanics course. Continue reading »