A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Recently on Brave Learning…

Tips for Enticing Your Children to Write

You can change how your kids feel about writing right now!

Try one of these today.

Create a treasure hunt—that rhymes! Send your kids hunting for some treat with clues you design. Then later, ask them to make one for you (on your birthday!).

Put Sticky Notes all over the bedroom door of your child. Fill them with jokes, silly word pairs, or aphorisms. Jot down comments about your child’s strengths, brief memories of their exploits, hints about the fun you will have during winter break, questions of the universe (“Who am I and why am I here?”, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”)… You decide. This is a stealth operation to be performed after your child is asleep. In the morning, your child will discover the door of notes! Leave a stack of sticky notes and a pen nearby. See if the child reciprocates. Some will.

Use lipstick to leave love notes on the bathroom mirror for your kids. [Keep reading]

Subscribe to Brave Learning on Substack where we chat, discuss, problem-solve, and create together. Here’s what you can expect: weekly themed content, freewriting prompts, and a podcast for kiddos called Monday Morning Meeting (first 6 are free)! 

Recently on Brave Learning…

Partnering with Your Child

Partnership Writing is the most overlooked stage of writing development.

I want to share with you a story from my own childhood, because I think it’s illustrative of the failure of the system that requires children to write without help.

My mother was a freelance author, wrote 75 books, and taught writing to professionals.

When I came up through the ranks as a child, my mother made sure I had opportunities to explore writing. She provided me with all kinds of tools—pretty pens, little journals. For my birthday one year, she gave me an All About Me book that includes my very first original story. She took me to the library every week. We read together. She took me to plays and movies. She encouraged me to make handmade cards and to play word games and to complete crossword puzzles. [Keep reading]

Subscribe to Brave Learning on Substack where we chat, discuss, problem-solve, and create together. Here’s what you can expect: weekly themed content, freewriting prompts, and a podcast for kiddos called Monday Morning Meeting (first 6 are free)! 

Recently on Brave Learning…

We’ve been talking all about Big Juicy Conversations on Substack! If you missed any posts, here they are:

• Talking with Your Kids
• The Power of Talking
• Conversations in the Car Count
• Two Ears, One Mouth
• When Your Children Aren’t Talkative

Also check out our Brave Writer podcast episode about Big Juicy Conversations!

For more support, download Brave Writer’s free Big Juicy Conversation Starters PDF. It may help you offer more interesting, provocative questions that the child wants to answer.

Subscribe to Brave Learning on Substack where we chat, discuss, problem-solve, and create together. Here’s what you can expect: weekly themed content, freewriting prompts, and a podcast for kiddos called Monday Morning Meeting (first 6 are free)! 

Recently on Brave Learning…

Home-learning

Let’s change the name from homeschooling to home-learning.

I’m all for innovation! We’ve got micro schools, online classes, and a huge array of co-op options in the homeschool space. Homeschooling is having a moment!

In this big shift, I want to be sure we remember one of the golden purposes of home education: we’re not just moving the location of the education, we’re also changing how that education is experienced by the child. 

This morning I stumbled on an article I used as research for one of my books. It’s an academic paper studying the effects of play and joy on learning in Finland. One of the initial assertions is that “emotions in the school world have been studied surprisingly little.” Anxiety and negative emotions get some attention, but happiness? Forget about it.

Yet joy, it turns out, is tied to a child’s experience of success. Joy in learning is the subject of this paper.

My tag line, “Joy is the best teacher” is validated by the research! [Keep reading]

Subscribe to Brave Learning on Substack where we chat, discuss, problem-solve, and create together. Here’s what you can expect: weekly themed content, freewriting prompts, and a podcast for kiddos called Monday Morning Meeting (first 6 are free)! 

Recently on Brave Learning…

Plan Their Happiness

not only their academics…

So you’ve got your homeschool planner in front of you. You’re looking at the stack of materials you bought for the coming school year. You’ve got a calculator on the table so you can figure out what pace you must work through all those pages to wind up at the end of the year with completed programs.

Homeschool planning: calendar and program are merged into a sequence of allotted materials for 180 days for each child.

Is that what you envision?

Before you go to the trouble, let me ask you a question: In all your planning, have you also planned for your child’s happiness? [More]

Subscribe to Brave Learning on Substack where we chat, discuss, problem-solve, and create together. Here’s what you can expect: weekly themed content, freewriting prompts, and a podcast for kiddos called Monday Morning Meeting (first 6 are free)!