Archive for the ‘Brave Writer Philosophy’ Category

Pat Schneider on honoring geniuses

My goodness. How can I not share this today?

“Genius often emerges where there is intimate support for it. Shakespeare worked in the intimate supportive community of a strong theater that wanted his next play. Dickinson worked within the intimate community of a family that loved her and protected her time and privacy. Neither of them were seen by their contemporaries as being greatly gifted. It seems truly important that there be a community of support around the artist that protects the making of art” (Pat Schneider *Writing Alone and With Others* xxi).

This quote struck me this morning as I work on the Partnership Writing product. What I know about homeschooling families is that they are uniquely intimate. That’s not to say there isn’t intimacy in families with kids in public or private schools. Rather, home education creates a context where genius can thrive. Why? Because there are no other people on the planet who are as predisposed to recognize the particular genius of children as the parents of those same little people.

Every time I speak, I’m inundated with mothers who share with me the brilliance of their kids—the breadth of imagination, the depth of vocabulary, the surprising accumulation of facts that the parent never saw the child amassing. Over and over again, parents marvel at who lives inside the skin of their children.

It’s from that appreciation, that “what a miracle is my child” posture that writing growth can occur! We are not fighting for success in grammar and punctuation. Our mission is not the proper execution of essays. We are not charged with critiquing and down-dressing our children for what appears to be lethargy or ineptitude.

Our chief mission at home with our children is to discover and articulate their particular brilliances, and then to fiercely protect the space into which they cast their risky thoughts so that they may take the tentative steps toward refining that genius, knowing they are emotionally supported and respected.

You get to do that work! Not a school. Not a theater company. But like Emily Dickinson’s family, you may provide for your children the emotionally safe, enthusiastically prepared environment that allows for risk-taking, failure, exaggeration, and blossoming—all in one.

Geniuses. That’s who you’re raising. Make sure you remember that today.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, On Being a Mother, Young Writers | Comments Off on Pat Schneider on honoring geniuses

Guidelines for blogging outside material

This is a fantastic article about how to cite sources when you blog online. Share with your kids or use it for your own blogging experiences:

How Not To Steal Other People’s Content

Blogs are hotbeds of source attribution issues, probably just due to the sheer volume of content that’s posted there on a daily basis (you awesome inbound marketer, you). So let’s walk through a couple common scenarios bloggers come across when creating their content, and figure out how to address them!

 

Posted in Advice from the pros, General, Help for High School | Comments Off on Guidelines for blogging outside material

Zippy tips for kids

2 zippy tips to get those rascals of yours on board

I promised that before the school year started, I’d give you a couple of pointers for how to get those kids of yours to buy into their homeschool experience. Here they are, in the nick of time!


1. Psst: They can’t read your mind. Let them in on your plans!

You know what I hate? I hate being super-duper excited about an idea I have that is sure to change the world, or at least tomorrow morning, only to have a kid—my kid!—roll her eyes at me and scowl.

I hate putting in endless hours reading, discussing, pondering, imagining, and preparing for this most-holy-and-awesome project only to meet sarcastic rejoinders, bored stares, and dawdling.

I hate being convinced by my posse of homeschool mom friends that the curricula I used last year blows and this new one is perfect, only to discover that I hate the first five paragraphs of explanation and now feel obligated to use it because of all the money I spent. I hate that my kids can tell I’m not excited and they make it worse by complaining…. OUTLOUD SO I CAN HEAR THEM.

Homeschooling is hard enough.

It’s intolerable when your kids DON’T WANT TO DO WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO DO.

To help your little rascals get into that same head space you’re in, you want to use a skill you’re famous for teaching your children: narration. Narrate aloud in a kind of Shakespearean soliloquy the process you are going through/went through that led you to this particular moment in time.

For instance, you might wake up one morning and move through the kitchen-family room talking aloud like this (while clearing shoes from the floor and empty dirty cups from horizontal surfaces):

You know, yesterday during nap time, I paged through our Incan chapter in the history text. Did you know they made these interesting patterns on clay pottery? I thought to myself, ‘I would love to paint pottery like that.’ Then I wondered how difficult it would be to get some clay to make the pots first. Easy! We have that Michael’s coupon.

Then I imagined what it must have been like for the archaeologists to have found those broken pots in the ground so many hundreds of years after they’d been made. You know?

So I got to thinking. What if I made a pot, painted it with cool Incan designs, smashed it with a hammer, and buried it in the backyard between layers of cardboard to show what century it came from? Then you guys could dig up the broken pots!

Or, even better, I wondered if you’d want to paint, smash, and bury the pots for me to dig up? Or we could do it for each other. Do you think you’d like to do something like that? Look at these pictures!

You model your process by narrating it to the kids. You invite them to move with you through the thoughts and ideas you generated so they have time to “catch up” to you and imagine it with you.

Sure, most kids would love to paint designs, hammer pots, and dig holes in the ground. But sometimes even your best ideas feel overwhelming to kids when they get dumped on their heads while they’re still wiping sleep from their eyes.

What do you do if the idea you have is
less immediately exciting?

When you want to move into a new set of workbooks, or you have decided to change how you teach math, or perhaps you have a child who will need to work harder than usual to learn to handwrite, you want to narrate your thinking process there too. But add brownies and some cuddle time.

(While on the couch, snuggled close together)

Sweetie, you know how we’re not enjoying ________ (math, writing, cursive, reading) right now? I have some friends who have shared some new ideas with me about how we might make it a little easier. It might take some effort to catch on and I know it will feel really weird at first to change what we’ve been doing, but how does this sound to you?

Here’s what it’s like. Here’s how it works. Here’s what you would be doing. How does that sound? (Listen.)

(Ask and mean it) Can we try it together for a week and then discuss how it feels? What time of day do you want to try it? Does it help if you have a plate of cookies by your side? Or iPod headphones in your ears? Or alone on your bed in your room, away from the chaos of the family?

Tell me how it really is for you and I will help you along the way. Here’s the philosophy behind this new way (state it in simple terms—more active, more concentration, more repetition, less tedium, more creativity, more predictability, slower, faster…). Then we’ll evaluate. Can you do it with me for a week (month, semester)?

This is how you narrate to your child what it is you might want to try, might want to do. You involve them, getting feedback. You’re still the parent. You can expect the child to cooperate or to try it, but you want to do so with a gentle, open mind. Allow for tweaks and feedback (even negative responses need to be heard).

If all else fails, you can try the new program yourself first. Sit at the table and start painting, or do copywork, or try the new math game. Talk about it as you do it. Let your kids watch you. Be upbeat and engaged. See who joins you. Laugh – that almost always pulls kids into what you are up to.

2. Psst: You can’t read their minds either! Ask them what they want.

On the flip side, your kids have been pondering, thinking, and imagining their lives too. Some of them spend time envisioning the next level they’ll beat on a video game. Others wish they could sew costumes or paint with watercolors. You might have a child who wants to be in a play or who wants to play an instrument. Maybe your daughter wants to become the next soccer star of her local team and your son hopes he can take a cake decorating class. A teen might want to spend hours a day watching the top 100 films listed by Criterion in order.

How will you know they have these dreams if you don’t ask? Where will those hours of the day come from if they’re already filled with your agenda or your wishes?

Even more, what if your kids have some thoughts about how to learn the hard subject area that they struggle with? It’s surprising the amount of insight some children have about their struggles if you know how to ask them the right kinds of questions. You might ask things like:

I know times tables feel hard to do. Does anything help? Do you prefer to hold things in your hand or draw on a chalk board? Does it help to talk to me as you work on them? What’s the hard part for you? Is it the book? Too busy and colorful? Too plain and tedious? Do the Cuisinaire rods hurt or help?

Don’t punch the questions at your child like a nail gun. Take them slowly, show curiosity. Sometimes a child will say one thing that unlocks the whole thing: 

I don’t get the point of the rods.

Suddenly you can see that your child is going through the motions without true understanding! More modeling and support, conversation and suggestions can follow. So pay attention and use your maturity and compassion to help you hear where the frustration comes from.

Usually lectures about the value of a specific subject area for their eventual adulthood doesn’t work with kids. What works is breaking down each task to its smallest part and relating it to their immediate world.

If there is no immediate connection, perhaps the work should fall to you to discover one before requiring a child to work that hard on the subject. After all, these are children. They don’t have the same level of fortitude to “do what they should” as you do as an adult. So take time (since you are the grown-up) to find the connection, to uncover the meaning, and to share it with love and support before requiring follow through and effort.

When your child shares what I like to call a B-HAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), you want to support the dream. For instance, our middle son, Jacob, wanted to go to NASA’S space camp. We didn’t earn enough at the time to afford it. So Jacob’s dad suggested that Jacob start a cookie business in our neighborhood to raise the money. And Jake did—he raised over $1000 between the ages of 10-12 to pay his entire way (including airfare).

We bought the ingredients, we taught him how to knock on doors to get customers, we supported him when he spoke to managers at grocery stores to see if he could sell cookies out front, we helped him open a bank account. We didn’t shut him down or make science experiments more important. We made time for him to achieve his goal with support and creativity. This choice took time away from other studies or activities. But it’s what he wanted to do.

Even to this day, Jacob (20) loves astronomy despite the fact that he isn’t planning to work in the space industry. He has this marker in childhood, though, of having set his mind to a Big Hairy Audacious Goal and fulfilling it. That attitude has continued right into his adulthood.

If you take the time to narrate what you imagine in your family and you take the time to listen to your children narrate what they imagine would make them happy, you will discover lots of things you could be doing together right now that would expand the joy and power of your homeschool immediately.

Isn’t that what you want?

I’d love to hear how it goes and what you find out from your kids. We can discuss in comments below.

Registration for fall classes opens on Monday, August 6, at noon eastern.

Remember: fall is our busiest time so if you are wanting a class, be sure to sign up early!

The new season of the Arrow and Boomerang are happening right now too! Not too late to sign up.

Rooting for you,


 

 

 

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Homeschool Advice, On Being a Mother, Young Writers | 4 Comments »

3 Tips to Transform Your Homeschool!

3 Tips to Transform Your Homeschool

Do you have curriculum on the brain? Is there one child you worry is not progressing like he should? Are you adamant inside that you will NOT neglect that one subject area like you did last year (you know, science, for example!)? Do you worry that you’ll be bored and can’t figure out what to do about that?

I remember when I was home educating my five kids, July felt like the last bell. I had to figure it out by August! Panic set in and I spent hours evaluating curriculum, talking online, calling friends, paging through catalogs… You know the drill.

Have you asked yourself this question, though?

Is curricula the key to fulfillment at home with my kids—the experience of success, progress, and good memories?

What if it’s not? What if you’re missing the main ingredient for a successful year with your kids and it can’t be purchased or shipped or researched?

Years ago, when I was in between a June and an August, I realized that I wished I knew how I could plan a year that would end with smarter kids, and me—happy and relieved, not exhausted, and worried. Ever felt like that?

We talk about how much we love homeschooling (really, most of us do!), but we also spend an equal amount of time:

worrying,
fretting,
planning,
revising,
ditching one book for another,
cycling back to the ditched program,
ditching it again, and so on.

We go from:

schedules to unschooling,
plans to inspiration,
child-led to parent-controlled,
workbooks to unit studies,
DVD instruction to co-ops,

looking for that perfect blend of instruction that leads to brighter kids, good feelings, and a clean kitchen to boot!

It’s so easy to doubt yourself when you home educate. You never know if you’ve got just the right combination of elements to sustain the joyful peaceful progress-creating home you imagined when you started.

The following tips are meant to help you off the hamster wheel of schedules and plans, and into the deeper space inside that helps you calibrate the mood and tone of your home.

3 Tips to Transform Your Homeschool

3 Tips to Transform Your Homeschool

1. See the end from the beginning.

Ask yourself in August how you will know you’ve been successful when you get to June. Pretend you are looking back on the coming year, not looking forward. What is the measurement you use to evaluate your home education experience?

Write it down!

It might be: Noah will have mastered the times tables and read 5 books on his own.

Or it could be: I’ll feel happy and relaxed at the end of the year.

Or it might be: My kids will have memories of concrete outings.

Or you might even think: I’ll know it was a good year if we complete three projects together that I can hold in my hands and share with someone else.

Note that each one of these examples is different in character. The first is specific to the child. Perhaps this is the year where one child needs to have a clear objective and you target that over everything else.

The second has to do with YOUR well-being. See that? You may like your homeschool routine and program, but you live from a space of anxiety and nerves. This year, your goal will be to create a routine that takes care of YOU so you don’t burden your kids with your micromanagement, or your hyper control, or your moodiness. If you get to the end of the year and feel good about yourself, regardless of how the schooling went, that will mean you hit your target!

The third might mean you must put a schedule into place. Take a day to plan several outings for the year and get them on the calendar so they really happen. Then do them! Know that if you get them done, you’ve hit your mark. Drink that in. Happiness at home is a group of satisfying experiences, not daily drudgery. A little goes a long way.

The last requires research and scheduling too, but also preparation. You want to have the materials on hand, the months picked out in advance, the projects lined up. You will want to know that projects sometimes obliterate other home education goals (like completing workbooks). You let yourself be okay with that by making the projects a priority.

These are four examples, but your needs may (and will likely) vary. The point here is that you must think ahead to your insides (your feeling-place) and then accept what comes. Your secret needs assert themselves whether you want them to or not, and these are different than your plans and goals.

Plans and goals are the execution tactics
you use to home educate.

You determine that you want to move a 10 year old through 4th grade materials in five subjects. Then you assemble the curricula, you map out (however tightly or loosely) a strategy for working through those books and ideas or projects. You target an end date. Done.

But that’s NOT what I’m talking about. Life intervenes and you rarely get through your plans successfully in a year for all 4 or 6 kids. Seriously.

I mean, if you plan one writing project per month per writing child (and let’s say you have 4 writers in your crew), that’s 40 writing projects to produce in one school year (10 per school year per child).

NO ONE GETS 40 WRITING PROJECTS DONE IN A YEAR.

So you are doomed before you even start, yet your plan looks perfectly reasonable.

The secret need underneath the plans and goals is the one we want to identify. Fulfilling the secret need is what lets YOU know that you’re doing a good enough job and that you’re using your resources, time, and energies wisely. You can’t see the end from the beginning until you know what your secret needs are.

3 Tips to Transform Your Homeschool

2. Identify the secret need.

I’ll give you a hint: Do NOT focus on plans. Instead, look back at last year and say to yourself—

“What makes me sad about last year?” (Or insert any emotion—”What makes me wistful, or angry, or worried, or upset, or frustrated, or happy, or proud?”)

If the answer is something like:

“The House! It drives me bananas. I can never find the books we need when we need them, there are no sharpened pencils, and the kitchen table is covered in mail and left over cereal bowls.”

You now know—a clear, deep, felt need is to have control over your stuff and your environment. It doesn’t SEEM like it has anything to do with home education, but in fact, it may be the difference between your sanity and your kids’ progress in math! As a friend of 7 kids told me, her adult children joked that one year, one of her children couldn’t find her math book for an ENTIRE YEAR and the mom never knew it. That’s not good!

If you have some happy memories but they are few, it might be worth it to ask yourself what you were doing in those moments that worked! That discovery may help you figure out your secret need. For example, maybe starting the day with copywork first thing after breakfast was the perfect solution to getting everyone into the mindset of shared learning.

Maybe poetry teatimes were the perfect antidote to too many workbooks and you found that you were more in love with your children on Tuesdays than Thursdays. How can you get more of that joy into your homeschool? Ask yourself.

Your secret need helps you to determine where to put
your strategic and emotional energy this year.

Here are some secret needs you might want to consider to prompt yours to come up from the depths. The need for:

  • order (if you feel you live in chaos)
  • support (friends, spouse, community, accountability)
  • happiness (no tears, laughter, energy around family activity)
  • balance (between project-y activities and daily predictable routine)
  • appreciation (someone else affirms what you do and gives you the praise you deserve)
  • measurable accomplishments (when most days feel like you’re a hamster on a wheel and you can’t see progress)
  • fun (laughter, activities, surprises, family outings or games)

Keep brainstorming. It’s so easy to knuckle down on our kids when we feel frustrated, lonely, tired, worried, or thwarted. You will know your secret need when you suddenly run into it like a red brick wall—

I’m so frustrated!! or
I’m so done with homeschool!! or
If I could just get out of this house (or get everyone else out!) for 3 hours, I’d be okay!!

Once you know your secret need, address it. Pick one way you can work on that one need (don’t tackle six or sixteen secret needs). You need to be able to create a concrete strategy for how to meet it.But there’s one more component you must address as you plan this next year. Not just seeing the end from the beginning or knowing what your secret needs are is enough. There is one more factor to take into consideration.

3 Tips to Transform Your Homeschool

3. Remember that other people have goals and needs too.

So many women would be perfectly fine in their homes if it weren’t for…. fill in the blank—

  • their spouse,
  • school teacher mother-in-law,
  • homeschool discussion forum community with its endless advice and suggestions to reconsider everything with the miracle product,
  • their whiny kid,
  • the best friend home educator who does it all effortlessly and bakes bread from scratch, too,
  • their college degree reminding them that they’re not using it,
  • the books they read about learning.

If you find that you doubt yourself regularly, identify where those voices come from. Is it the “ghost-of-public-school-past” on your left shoulder, whispering in your ear, reminding you of what you did in school that you aren’t doing with your kids?

Is it your husband who asks what you did all day and hopes you show him pages of words and equations, not dress-up clothes and sidewalk chalk?

Is it your best friend who doesn’t say a word, but whose happiness and success is obvious to you and you don’t know how to achieve it?

Is it one of your children who has told you she hates school even though you’ve worked so hard to make it a happy space for her?

No matter how clear your goals, no matter how accurately you identify your secret needs, if you don’t silence the nay-saying voice(s) in your life, you will never feel successful to the degree that you want to.

You need to know two things:

  1. You can’t make everyone happy, particularly those outside your family.
  2. Conversely, it helps to listen to your family members and provide one or two ways for them to be happy, even if they want things you don’t typically want or find difficult to do.

For instance: If you feel burdened by endless curriculum discussion online, yet love the support of those communities, find other places to converse where curricula isn’t the central focus. Be brutally honest here. It’s so easy to get lost in hours of conversation that ultimately leads to your perennial dissatisfaction. Don’t get sucked in!

Get that social need met differently so you don’t keep swapping out homeschool materials that are already working just to satisfy some itch for social connection online. Being an expert in curriculum might actually undermine your ability to use it (more time spent talking about it than enjoying it!).

On the other hand, if you have a spouse who is nervous or worried about home education, you will want to incorporate some of his secret needs into your plans so you are both happy at the end of the year. Work through these same 3 steps with him, over coffee. Get on the same page. Let him know that you want to be a team.

To be happy at home, everyone needs to buy in
and feel they have a chance at feeling peaceful.

If you have a frustrated kid or two, it’s nice to ask your children what they would like to do this year that would send them over the moon into joy! What are their big aspirations and hopes? How can you make those come true? At least on some scale? (I’ll write more about this in an upcoming email/blog post.)

The point is this: Don’t forget to plan how you will feel this year, not just what you will do.

If you forget to take your real needs and feelings into account (and if you forget to check in with yourself and your family throughout the year), you will plan for emotional exhaustion and dissatisfaction which is never how any of us wants to remember a year of homeschool.

Brave Writer Online Classes

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy | 19 Comments »

Podcast: Partnership Writing

Partnership Writing

We press on! This week’s podcast is the second in the series where we look at each of the natural developmental stages of growth in writing.

This particular episode focuses on the most overlooked stage of development in the writing journey and accounts for the development of writer’s block and writing resistance in kids. If you successfully navigate the Partnership Writing phase, your kids will not be plagued with the “blank page, blank stare” syndrome. You’ll both know how to create writing and what role you each play in the process. Enjoy.

Julie

Partnership Writing product

Partnership Writing

A year-long language arts program for 9–10 year olds (age range is approximate).

Partnership Writing gives you step by step instructions through developmentally appropriate writing projects. It provides 10 month-long writing projects that combine original writing and skills in mechanics.

Pair Partnership Writing with The Writer’s Jungle. The Writer’s Jungle teaches a parent how to coach a child to self-express their original thoughts in writing.

For a complete writing program, combine the two products above with The Arrow—for the mechanics of writing taught through copywork and dictation, using quality literature.

We’ve made it easy to purchase the whole bundle of these products (at a discount) here.

Ready for more?

Below are links to the complete Stages of Growth in Writing podcast series.

Jot It Down!
Partnership Writing
Building Confidence
Transition to Ownership Part 1
Transition to Ownership Part 2
Eavesdropping on the Great Conversation

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Natural Stages of Growth in Writing, Podcasts | 9 Comments »