Archive for the ‘Brave Writer Philosophy’ Category

Contacting me or Brave Writer: Please do!

I sometimes forget that we get new people interested in Brave Writer all the time. One of the distinctives about this company is that my primary objective is to offer you as much support as you need to keep you and your kids writing. You don’t simply purchase a book from Brave Writer and slink off to a homeschooling island to use it. Brave Writer provides you with opportunities for feedback and follow-up support because, frankly, writing is a community project. No one successfully writes in isolation. Even more, fledgling editors (you) need the eagle-eyed help of more experienced editors. That’s why we have a staff to handle classes and to answer your writing/language arts questions.

So use us! We aren’t at all put off by your questions, but are energized by them. Post your thoughts to this blog, to the forums, to email. Join classes and get support from a BW coach. Above all-find other Brave Writer mothers in your community and support each other. The more you take writing off the kitchen table and into a supportive community, the better for all of you.

Here’s where to find us and how you can contribute to making this a supportive community:

Marcy asked (and others like her have also asked) how to send me teatime photos for our weekly Tuesday Teatime post.

Email me your experience and photos: julie [AT] bravewriter [DOT] com

Attach your photos or put them right in the email. We’ll upload them and share them here. Always include a bit about your experiences. We’ll send you a free issue of the Arrow or Boomerang for your trouble. Tuesday Teatime photos are among the favorite blog posts so please do send them.

If you have questions related to writing, or if you have a student’s work that you’d like to share for feedback, I ask you to submit it to the public forum on the Brave Writer website called The Scratch Pad. Brave Writer mothers and I will give you feedback to help you continue on your writing way. I don’t prefer to read your students’ writing through email as my email is already bombarded and I sometimes can’t get to it right away and then inevitably it scrolls down into the oblivion that is my in-box. 🙂

If you’ve ever sent a question or writing sample for feedback and haven’t heard from me, that is invariably what’s happened. Just try again or post to the forums where your post will stay “stuck” in one place and can’t do the disappearing act on me. I do get over 100 emails a day for business and personal stuff. I read every one and try to respond to every one. If I don’t get to yours, send it again.

If you’re confused about curricula choices, classes, language arts programs or any other aspect of the Brave Writer lifestyle, you may email me, post your questions to the forums or call me. I can’t always talk when you call, but we can schedule a time to discuss whatever your question is. I won’t post my phone number here, but it is on the signature file of my emails. So email me first and if a call is needed, you may then call me.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Contacting Me, General | 3 Comments »

Keeping Up with the Joneses in School

Keeping up with the Joneses in School

One of the challenges of homeschooling is that most of us never were. We grew up in schools. We have the voices of a dozen administrators and teachers whispering in our heads as we teach our children. They ask us if our kids are doing enough “school work,” if they are “grade appropriate,” if they could survive if they were ever put in school.

Sometimes even our spouses or parents add volume to these voices with specific questions:

“Did you do anything today?”

“Why doesn’t Katie know her times tables like her cousin?”

I know that for me, these voices get loudest when I’ve been distracted and not attentive to my kids. If a week goes by where I’ve had two dental appointments, a trip to the vet, lots of business and a flooded basement, the routine of activities that reassures me that my kids are getting a better education (or at least, a different one) than their schooled peers is sidelined. When that happens, I doubt my effectiveness as a home educator and all those whispers become shouts.

A personal philosophy of home education
is critical to resisting the voices.

I’ve noticed that today’s new homeschoolers often start right out with curricula and skip what I consider the most important step in the homeschooling journey: developing a philosophy of education. Brave Writer, for instance, isn’t a system or schedule or curricula as much as it is a philosophy of language arts and writing that then gets executed very differently from what is done in school. The process and results don’t match well with 3rd grade language arts or 5th grade creative writing. The only way to embrace the difference is to believe in and be reassured by the philosophy (and documented evidence of its effectiveness) when you wander down this very different path to your children’s education.

So what should be done to develop that philosophy of education and what good is it at the end of the year when your kids have to take standardized tests (as they do in some states)?

Let’s look at each piece:

The Philosophy

Home education is deliberately not “school.” The home education movement removes children from buildings, teachers and curricula to bring them home to spend the day with parents. Parents’ reasons for this non-traditional educational path have ranged from religious conviction to special needs support to accelerated learning to real life learning (as opposed to learning from a canned curricula). Each one of us must spend time identifying our reasons for homeschooling. It helps to read books, to join email lists, to chat online in homeschool discussion groups, to meet monthly with a local support group. These are the places where you cultivate your convictions about why home education is the right choice for your family.

Remember: there is no perfect educational model that will yield better results in every category, in every condition. You can’t expect kids educated at home who aren’t being drilled to death for standardized tests to do as well as kids whose teachers spend half the year preparing their kids to take those same tests. That some of our kids do better than the kids in school without all that preparation is even more remarkable! If you are a home educator, standardized testing is one good reason to keep your kids out of the system so that all they have to do is take the tests, not be enslaved to them for half a school year. Additionally, no one is going to make your child “go to school” for a low score. Find out what the minimum score is that your state requires to show advancement and then shoot for that. You are educating a whole person, not a test taker.

The Practice

When you’ve determined your philosophy of home education and have developed it to include why you see it as a better choice than the alternative, it’s time to think about how to carry out your philosophy. Here’s the trick, though. The practice is nothing like what you remember from school. That means (pay attention here) the results will look different than what you get in school. Some of what you accomplish will be light years better in an obvious way (snuggling on the couch, great discussions about a book you are reading aloud, trips to the zoo, kitchen science experiments that are bubbly and dramatic, nature walks that lead to blackberry bushes, learning to read at one’s own pace, math facts learned without ever studying them). Other results will seem inferior (not as advanced in math or spelling or writing as age mates in school, timidity in your child, no cool projects to hang on the wall, standardized test scores not as high as you imagined).

Even some schooled kids have low test scores, don’t learn their times tables well, are poor writers and readers, and find it difficult to sustain friendships in the school setting.

Read that last sentence again. For some reason, when we compare our kids to schooled kids, we tend to compare our normal kids to the top of the class in school. We just assume that the norm in school is higher than what our kids are producing, but that is patently false. Think back to your own school career and the friends you had. Some of you excelled at everything, but many of you are painfully aware of your own gaps as an adult. You remember friends who fell through the cracks, or who had to repeat a grade.

Home education is not about scores, proving oneself in the arena of “A” students or even meeting the demands of school scopes and sequences. Home education is about nurturing your children’s love of learning so that as they encounter new and interesting aspects of the world around them (the sciences, history, literature, art, music, poetry, theater, nature, astronomy, movies, writing, crafts, gardening, cooking, cleaning up after one’s self, driving a car, making a friend, redecorating a bedroom…), they feel inspired and competent to learn all they need to about the subject at hand.

We are attempting to create a rich educational environment
that is not out of a box or canned curricula,
but that invites participation!

We homeschool because we want to catalyze a love of learning. We homeschool because we value each child’s unique pace in acquiring what he or she needs for a successful, satisfying, meaningful place in the adult world.

So standardized tests? Don’t stress about them. Evaluate your home education by your philosophy and practice, not by how school measures it.

Beware the Ghost of Public School Past

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, BW and public school | 6 Comments »

My amazing mother

While in Grand Rapids, one of the moms asked me how I came to teach writing in this way. If there really weren’t writing materials that approached writing with this emphasis on relationship, how did I stumble onto the idea, the process? Well, the journey is more complex than a soundbite answer.

Still, there is one towering influence on how I see the relationship of writer to parent: my mother.

Karen O’Connor, my mother and author of over 60 books (juvenile non-fiction, adult Christian, devotionals), was my first writing teacher. Scratch that. She was my writing ally, my primary educator. A lover of books, my mother read aloud to us regularly. I remember snuggling in bed listening to her voice wrap itself around each of the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories.

Trips to the library were highlights of each week. My mom would walk through the children’s section with each of us pointing out favorites like the Carolyn Haywood books, or Ramona, the Pest by Beverly Cleary. I snapped them up. Each day during the summers between school years, my mom expected us to spend time after lunch reading quietly to ourselves. She sometimes ran through flashcards with us for math or musical notes, too, because she believed that education was year round and didn’t want us to lose what we had gained in school over a summer.

She took us to museums, plays, and movies. She sewed Halloween costumes and dress up clothes. She indulged our need for tea parties with miniature tea sets.

And when I risked writing (as I did from a young age), my mother’s delight made me want to do it again, and again, and again.
In 7th grade I wrote a short story for my language arts class. We were supposed to pick a plot model: Man v. Man, Man v. Nature or Man v. Himself (sorry about all those masculines, but that’s how they framed things back then). I chose “Man v. Himself” for my story. I wrote about a girl getting lost in Mexico on a family trip, drawing directly on a recent family vacation in Guaymas. I still remember the purple marker I used to copy the final draft.

When I presented the original to my mother, she appropriately gushed over the development of the primary character (a direct rip-off of myself), the anxiety the reader felt when the girl got lost and the resourcefulness of that same character to solve her own dilemma. Then, she did what any good editor should do: “I love your idea. I would love your opening to grab me. How about adding a dialog here that shows me how she’s getting ready rather than telling me?” My mom then asked me to imagine in my mind what the family room scene might look like.

I closed my eyes and saw bottles of RC Cola, Cheeto’s spilled on the floor, a TV turned on, and a mother scolding the two main characters to get things cleaned up so that they could start packing for the trip. My mother enthused that this would be a far superior way to get the ball rolling. She helped me to translate these images into conversation. Then we worked our way through the story as she helped me to beef up my verbs, to add dialog in a few other places, to heighten the danger at the climax.

That story wound up being about 12 pages of purple ink held together by a yellow folder. My teacher loved my story. She made a special point of saying so to me privately.

Thus began a very meaningful, happy partnership between my mother and me over the next twenty years of writing. Her insight and support transformed my college entrance essay into a model that my high school English teacher used for his students. She typed papers for me and taught me how to cite references. When I took my first steps toward publication, she gave me her old favorite books about writing and she helped me understand the importance of craft, not just inspiration. Then she gushed over each feeble attempt to draft a short story. She cheered when my first published article appeared in La Leche League’s magazine.

Whenever I send her my writing (which I have continued to do throughout my life), my mom is the one I can count on to notice the good stuff first, to find the gems in the mess of dirt, to help me see the value of my ideas before the writing matches. Her feedback comes from both her wisdom as a writer herself, but also as a mother: someone who knows me well and wants to pull from me the rare insights that she can see by virtue of being my mother.

I don’t need her for editorial feedback so much today. But my mom is still one of my favorite audiences. When I wrote my MA thesis last year, that she would wade through fifty pages of theological treatise just to see what my mind had been up to meant the worl;d to me. Because she’s been reading my writing since I was seven years old and wrote about a litter of kittens, I felt strangely proud of her feedback knowing it came with love and the long view of my development as a human being. And of course, as only she could, my mother gushed about my work.

So yeah: Brave Writer owes a lot to my mom who blazed a trail of what it means to create a language-rich environment while nurturing her children’s writing abilities. Thanks Mom.

And happy birthday to her. She turns 70 on April 8 and I get to spend the weekend before it with my mother, my aunt and my sister in San Francisco. Lucky me.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Family Notes, General | 5 Comments »

Freewriting Works

Freewriting Works

So I was sitting under an umbrella on my blue yoga mat on the concrete and soaked stands watching Liam play lacrosse. This is what mothers do. We sit in the cold rain and wind to watch our kids get blindsided by a high check to the helmet and slammed to the AstroTurf so that they only play five minutes of the 60 minute game. It is reassuring to have the coach call today to check up on Liam who is certain he cracked a rib (I’m still not sure, but he didn’t play again).

Powerless to mother Liam, once he was off the field sitting on a wet bench in the whipping high winds recovering from strep throat and dizziness (I know – ugh!), I took up a chat with the mom to my right. She’s a reading specialist in our local elementary school. Quickly she discovered that I homeschool and run a business that teaches writing. I so appreciated her next question:

“So do you have a philosophy of writing?”

Brilliant! I don’t think anyone in casual conversation has ever asked me that. I dove in: Peter Elbow? Freewriting? Nurturing your writer? Supportive, validating feedback?

No on Elbow, no on freewriting, but yes on nurturing and supportive feedback. Thus a discussion ensued where we compared notes on how to encourage kids to talk, to express thoughts, to get their ideas out of their heads and onto paper. As I explained how freewriting works, a mom two wet bleachers below us, wheeled around to interrupt.

“Excuse me, I couldn’t help over hearing you. Please don’t mind me. It’s just that freewriting changed my son’s life.”

“Oh really,” I replied, excited to hear her “testify”!

“In third grade, my son had a teacher who completely changed my son’s life. Well, his writing life anyway. She taught her students how to write to a timer, how to put their thoughts to paper regardless of how they came out. Suddenly my son who had been a reluctant writer found his voice! He learned to write!”

She went on, as only moms can. She let us know that today, in junior high, when he has an assignment to complete at home and is stumped by it, she only has to say the name of that teacher and the word “freewriting” and suddenly he will check into himself and start writing. She was utterly blown away by how powerful that one practice has been in his life for the last four years.

Needless to say, the reading specialist next to me took note! She followed this testimonial with questions for me, comparing notes on how she might improve her students’ freedom in writing and thinking. I loved her comments that while she spends a lot of time helping kids to “read aloud,” it occurred to her last week that what these kids really needed was someone to talk to about what they were reading. We brainstormed some questions she could ask and how she could encourage better comprehension.

Despite the freezing cold rain, the whole space felt warmer simply from savoring the idea that children are valuable and can be led into greater and greater self-expression through supportive, friendly conversation and, of course, freewriting.

Freewriting Prompts

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Friday Freewrite, Writing about Writing | 3 Comments »

Good morning everyone!

I’m back from Grand Rapids and the wonderful, enriching time I shared with the 33 women who attended. They came to the frigidly cold north from across the country: California, New Hampshire, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and all parts Michigan. I’ve been mulling over how to describe and summarize the deeply satisfying weekend we shared together. I think the word I’d use is “personal.” It always amazes me that teaching about writing leads to personal revelation and reevaluation. As we looked at how mothers draw out the writers in our children, we confronted what ways we block the free-flow of their imaginations, ideas and words. We had to face the fact that sometimes we haven’t wanted to hear about the things that interest our kids, that we haven’t valued their thought lives because we feared they weren’t interested in the “right” things or “educational” things or that they were perhaps even treading next to what for some have been labeled “dangerous” things (video games, role playing cards, or fairies, for instance).

Yet by appreciating the rich complexity that is each child, by taking notes when they speak their meandering recitations of a movie or game they’ve played, of the way they built the snow fort in the front yard… we demonstrate that in fact what they think about deserves preservation on paper and that it ought to be shared with a larger audience than Mom. These kinds of insights led to memories about our own parents and the ways we’ve been validated and understood or dismissed and ignored. It was interesting to hear, for instance, one mom share that she and her siblings would never tell their parents about their changed religious and political beliefs because these would be unwelcome by their parents. It struck me that that unwillingness to share our real selves with our parents develops over a lifetime of feeling our thoughts and ideas don’t matter. What an opportunity we have to be different kinds of parents and writing partners!

Another mother shared with me that since her wonderful father died, she had lost her love of writing. It was as if that part of her had died – the part that shared who she was with her dad and the world. Through the weekend, she found the will and desire to express herself again and wants to provide that outlet to her children. Truly, our parents form and shape us for good or ill. We get to choose.

We talked about all the usual things: copywork, dictation, narration, revision, editing, freewriting. Yet through it all, a golden thread of tenderness and love for children wove these disparate language arts practices into a stronger cloth. Because the best writing advice is “write what you know,” we discovered that the best “teaching writing advice” is “know your writers.” And because we rarely bother to know something well without loving it, it occurred to me that a Brave Writer translation of these two principles might be:

Love your writers, so they will be free to write what they love.

In the end, this is not only how we learn to write well, but how we learn to know and love each other. Once again, writing becomes the conduit to self-knowledge, but also to loving relationships. There really is power in the word.

Thanks to all you lovely ladies who shared the weekend with me. I feel equally recommitted to, re-vested in my children and family.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, BW products, General | 8 Comments »