Our December 8 meeting, a roundtable discussion about building writing into our homeschool programs, was full of lots of creative ideas. Many people use many different ways to teach writing, to encourage writing outside of "school," and to get their children to write during school time.
Something that our family has done with our young children is to use dictation and narration. Dictation is reading a sentence to your child and having him write it out. Then together you gently correct the sentence (make sure it starts with a capital letter, ends with correct punctuation, etc.). Since I always kept a read-aloud book going, I would look a page or two ahead of where we were in that book for a sentence that addressed something that we were learning about (using question marks or commas in series, identifying prepositional phrases, etc.), and that would be the sentence I used for dictation.
Narration is when a child reads a story and then tells the story back in his own words. We have used this in conjunction with the history and science books that I have my children read. Once a week, they would draw a picture, then write a narration for one of those books. For first and part of second grades, they would dictate the story to me, and I would write it down and then read it back with them. Once they were able to write on their own, I had them write their own narration.
For older children, formal writing seems to be done a little less frequently, and many of us wondered how often we should be requiring writing. Jenni shared that her assessor suggested that her grade school aged daughter ought to be doing book reports 2-3 times a year. Anna shared that she gets writing prompt ideas from Pintrest and gives those to her children periodically. (Maybe once a month?) She asks them to write a five sentence paragraph about the prompt. Lisa shared that she has her older elementary and middle school aged children write a synopsis of an article from World magazine about twice a month.
What about larger writing projects? Lisa recommended the missionary biographies published by YWAM and their corresponding unit studies. At the beginning of the school year, each of her children (ages 10-15) chooses one biography to read. The unit studies have writing assignments to go along with each biography, and she uses those to have the children prepare a presentation at the end of the year. I also utilize a large writing assignment each year. Beginning in the fourth grade, I have my children write one research paper of appropriate length (2-5 pages for grade school, 5-7 for middle school and beginning high school, 7-9 for high school) each year. We go through the writing process of making research note cards, outlining, and writing both rough and final drafts.
Anna and Lisa also talked about encouraging their children to creatively write, not necessarily for school. Anna's children have notebooks in which they are allowed to write their creative ideas. Right now they are working on graphic books. They actually keep their notebooks in the truck so that they can write while they are going places. Lisa's daughter keeps several notebooks with story beginnings in them that she has written. They aren't all finished, but she keeps them together in one place so that when she gets an idea she can simply pull out the notebook for that story and pick up where she left off.
Finally, we talked about "formula writing." I've heard SAT essay graders present at homeschool conventions that the College Board is very much against "formula writing." They pointed out that this includes using "ly" words and other strategies that I've heard are used by certain writing programs. However, the anecdotal evidence that has been heard from college students is that those are the kinds of things that professors are actually looking for in college writing assignments. I think our group came to the conclusion summed up by one of our dads, "There is life after the SAT."
Ultimately, I think we all know that writing is important, but sometimes struggle with fitting it in to our busy days or forcing children who don't like it to do it. Hopefully, we all came away with some ideas that will help us to do a little more writing and to encourage our children to try some new (and perhaps less intimidating) ways of writing.
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