If you were a mouse in your house in the evening, what would you see your family doing?
Archive for October, 2008
Tuesday Teatime: Caddy family
Hi Julie,
We’re new to Brave Writer this year—I attended the workshop you held in Grand Rapids last March (I’m the one who asked you if you happened to be a LLL Leader, since I recognized many familiar LLL ideas in your writing and speaking), and we’re slowly incorporating Brave Writer ideas into our life. We started having poetry teas last spring—finally a way to enjoy poetry together!
A friend of mine recently told me her 8 year old daughter was really interested in learning about poetry, but she didn’t know how to teach her. I sent her some information about Brave Writer and directed her to the website to read more, then we had a big poetry tea on Sept 5 with all six children. Each of the children read or recited a couple of poems and we all enjoyed tea together. Her daughter memorized several poems and also taught her 4 year old brother some poems he could recite on his own, and one that they did together. My 7 year old son drew a picture of a shark to illustrate his poem. Everyone learned how varied poems can be and we all had a wonderful time together. We have decided to make this a monthly event—all the kids look forward to it. Our next Poetry Tea is scheduled for this Friday, Oct. 3.
Thanks, Julie, for helping out our family.
Ann
P.S. I was a La Leche League leader for ten years. Some of my first published writing was for La Leche League as a matter of fact!
Friday Freewrite: What if…?
What would you do if you woke up in another country and no one could understand you?
Teaching Language Arts Through Literature
Brave Writer’s tailor-made Mechanics & Literature programs help you execute your best intentions with regard to:
- grammar,
- spelling,
- punctuation
- and writing mechanics.
These tools feature a quality work of fiction while highlighting passages that assist you in teaching these language arts elements to your kids in the context of real writing.
Real Writing
Sometimes I’m asked if these tools are sufficient for teaching grammar, in particular. What I’ve noticed over the years of home educating five kids myself as well as the thousands of students we’ve now taught through Brave Writer is that the best education for the mechanics of writing is reading real writing. Some parents complain, however, that their kids read a ton and aren’t making the connection between what they read and what they write. It worries them! And of course it does! These are your kids.
Our programs give you the ability to feature language arts elements in the context of great writing! Your kids naturally come to adopt the mechanics of writing in English through the soothing, repetitive practices of:
- reading,
- pondering,
- and copywork.
The power of this methodology came clear to me when my then 14-year-old son, Liam, who struggled a lot with writing (has dysgraphia and was delayed in writing), suddenly blossomed. Copying passages from Redwall (his previous obsession) bore fruit! As he started writing his own reviews of novels he read, the flair to his natural writing voice, his “knack” for punctuation, and his spelling were startlingly accurate. Sure he had some run-on sentences and occasional fragments. We would address those later. But the heart of his writing was pure flair and personality, mixed with terrific spelling and a reasonable grasp of basic punctuation.
I did no formal teaching of grammar with him. I just continued to trust the process of:
- reading aloud,
- reading to self,
- talking a lot about the novels and stories,
- and then copying passages from them.
We haven’t even graduated to dictation yet! Still the results are impressive.
Take a look at Brave Writer’s Mechanics & Literature programs. Download the free samples and try them out. Then if you like them, feel free to purchase a yearly subscription or order Literature Singles based on the individual books you’re reading. You’ll be glad you did.
