Chimera are mythical creatures made up of the parts of different animals (example: a lion with a snake’s head). Make your own chimera using two or more different animals and describe how it might look and move about.
New to freewriting? Check out our online guide.
Our Brave Writer Online Writing Classes are truly unique in the homeschool market. Over 20,000 families have studied writing with us with wonderful results.
Our talented instructors are published authors and homeschool parents. They provide you with both writing and homeschool coaching, to help you dry the tears and foster a culture of writing in your family.
Brave Writer is all about personal investment and connection. Our instructors supply a deep commitment of time, and gentle, practical instruction that leads to happy, improved writers.
Our writing classes are built from the workshop, writing support group model.
Important Change
Kidswrite intermediate, our most popular high school essay prep class, has exploded out of its britches! We have so much material we want to teach your kids about the essay—how to read, how to think, how to cite—that we’ve reconfigured the class into three month-long topics.
*NEW* Essay Prep Series:
Take them in any order, take one or all of them. Up to you!
Watch this 30+ minute video for detailed information about each class.
Spring Class Registration opens at noon ET on Dec. 4 (Set your alarm clocks!). Sign up for the Arrow and Boomerang Book Clubs then too.
Spring is a great time to JUMP into Brave Writer online writing classes. If you want to reboot your homeschool experience of writing, let us help you!
Brave Writer mom, Christa, writes:
Dear Julie
I just wanted to send you a note to say I appreciate your fun podcast. I’m listening to the Roadschooling episode now. The World Schooling one was fun also and you mentioned you wanted stories of other homeschoolers that are “world” schooling.
We live in Switzerland. My husband is Russian and I’m American. Possibly you remember me writing to you a few years ago. Our twin 13 year olds have taken a couple of your online classes over the past couple of years. We also have a 3 year old boy.
As an international family we’ve had the challenges and adventures of living in both Latvia and Switzerland. My twins recently got to go on a trip with my husband to Germany and sit in business meetings and see Berlin, then to Estonia to an event and sightseeing, and then Latvia and Lithuania. I love when they are learning through travel and new experiences.
We go to Minnesota/North Dakota each summer for two months and then we take full advantage of English speaking opportunities, time with family, and my twins love playing street music outside my dad’s store in a cute little resort town, among other adventures. We wouldn’t be able to do that if we were in the Swiss school system because they only get 4 weeks of summer break.
Over the years we’ve gotten to visit Iceland, France, Turkey, Dubai, Germany, Liechtenstein, tour around Switzerland, and tour a bit around the US.
I love hearing stories of other traveling homeschoolers. Traveling has provided some of our most memorable family/school times together and I’m grateful for all of the opportunities.
I don’t know what you’d call our approach exactly – lately I think its a “do it all, see it all” sort of fly by the seat of your pants sort of a deal. One son decided he wanted to try cello so off we went to get a cello to rent, in addition to his violin and piano. The other twin wanted to add guitar to piano, so we ran off to rent a guitar and he’ll have his first lesson tomorrow. Alex, with the violin and cello, is crocheting animals to sell at a Christmas market. Erik is redesigning our house and designing his dream house in Archicad, the real Architect’s program.
So there’s never a dull day. Our normal week includes classes in English, Russian, German and French, which is a logistical nightmare that I hope works out in the end but we are required to learn German and French, I can only teach in English, and my husband’s first language is Russian.
It’s an adventure and most of the time it is fun. Thanks for your encouragement for homeschoolers. I’ve learned much from your podcasts and Periscopes.
Have a great day.
Sincerely,
Christa
Today’s episode will help you learn to trust! As our podcast guest Stephanie likes to quote, “There are no educational emergencies.” We can start with our kids wherever they are, just as they are.
Stephanie Elms is a 15 year homeschool veteran and our senior homeschool coach in the Brave Learner Home. She helps parents find their footing and keep it in this long, challenging, wonderful journey.
Stephanie and I met when she invited me to be a part of the Virginia Homeschoolers’ conference. I knew right away we were kindred spirits. Stephanie has homeschooled her two sons with kindness, intuition, and a hefty dose of trust. Her insight in the Homeschool Alliance is so popular, one member said, “If you close the Alliance, I’m going to have to have Stephanie on speed dial. I can’t get by without her!”
Today’s podcast gives you a chance to get to know Stephanie and her heart for helping homeschool parents live their best lives. Enjoy!
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Tune in to the Brave Writer podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher (or your app of choice), and here on the Brave Writer blog.
Would you please post a review on Apple Podcasts for us?
Help a homeschooler like you find more joy in the journey. Thanks!
You’ve done it. Taken the plunge. Decided to homeschool your high schooler. Ack! Now what? How do you ensure your teen gains the skills necessary to do the kinds of academic writing necessary at the high school level and beyond?
Have we got the class series for you!
Brave Writer’s three Essay Prep online classes help teens bridge the gap between free-form personal narrative writing and the more disciplined rhetorical thinking required in essay writing. The main goal is to help kids discover they have something to say before they try to muscle those thoughts into the confines of format writing.
These classes are unique in the realm of writing instruction, and we’ve seen them transform the writing lives of many high school students!
You walk onto the expanse of trimmed green grass as the fans settle into the stands. Your lacrosse helmet grips your head as you fasten the chin strap. The piercing whistle of the referee calls the team to the field, and you shove two bulky white gloves onto trembling hands. A teammate hands you a lacrosse stick and shouts “Let’s go!” There’s only one problem. You’ve never played lacrosse before in your life.
That scene may remind you of a scary dream where you were unprepared for the task that lay ahead of you. And yet that is often how we approach essay writing with teenagers. When we ask kids to write essays without first immersing them in the genre, it feels a bit like learning how to play lacrosse by being thrust into the championship game.
Essay Prep: Reading the Essay develops the skills of literary analysis and use of literary strategies as teens read and write about well-crafted essays. Participants in this class will explore the writing of essayists to investigate what makes for a powerful essay. They’ll then take the techniques used by professional writers and practice those literary strategies in their own original writing.
Robust thinking skills are the cornerstone of strong academic writing. While the format of the essay can be taught in a quick lesson, knowing what to say in an essay is more involved. This class uncovers the mind life of your young writers and gives them writing tools to express their ideas using vivid, compelling language.
Essay Prep: Dynamic Thinking develops the skills of flexible thinking and rhetorical imagination as students examine varied perspectives on a topic. Your teen will develop the mental agility to consider multiple viewpoints and ultimately argue his or her point of view more persuasively as a result.
The projects in this class include discovering the “true truth” in writing, powerful association, rhetorical thinking, and a final collage assignment where students apply their own lens to a topic of interest and show what the topic looks like from varied points of view. This class asks students to add their writer’s voice to the Big, Juicy Conversations happening all around them.
If you’ve ever watched your teen struggle to do research, you know how frustrating it can be. A simple internet search to find information on animal testing can take hours. And what happens once the precious research materials have been acquired? Reading articles, taking notes, organizing outlines, crafting correct citations—the thought of doing an entire research project is enough to make the most enthusiastic writer crumble.
Essay Prep: Research and Citation focuses on developing skill in finding, evaluating, paraphrasing, and citing the writing of expert sources. By focusing primarily on the process of research—crafting interesting questions, doing effective internet searches, exploring local sources, taking notes, observing different viewpoints, and more!—your student will be prepared to do more effective research in future essay classes.
We hope you’re as excited by this class series as we are! If you have any questions watch the video below for a more in depth look at our college prep classes, or we invite you to email us.
