Archive for the ‘Email’ Category

Friday Freewrite: Feelings!

Friday Freewrite: Feelings

Julie,

I am a Brave Writing Momma of two school aged boys (5th and 2nd grade). This year we have happened to fall into a new Friday Freewrite pattern that I thought you’d like to know about. Friday Feelings! This idea was based on your email suggestion to write about fear. I just told the boys to write about fear, what makes you afraid, what fear feels like, whatever direction they wanted to take it in.

The following week we discussed the opposite of fear. After brainstorming we decided as a group that we would write about confidence. It was interesting to hear our different voices come through. My second grader wrote two sentences and drew a picture, my fifth grader wrote about three quarters of a page, and I poured my soul out in my journal and fear of failing as a homeschooling momma!

We are currently read The Lemonade Wars (and doing The Arrow study along with it) and loving the rich emotional tension in the novel. Today we brainstormed a list of emotions that we observed in The Lemonade Wars. I am planning to use this list as our Friday Feelings Writing springboard.

This isn’t a revolutionary idea but I thought you’d like to see how naturally the various aspects of the Brave Writer Lifestyle came together for us!

Thanks Julie for making the days more fun for us all!

Karyn

New to freewriting? Check out our online guide.
Image by hary_cz / fotolia

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Capturing their words

A recipe for loving language

Hi Julie,

After we spoke yesterday, I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed a dog-eared recipe box; it’s the container for one of my most prized possessions. Inside the box are dozens of index cards. Each card is written with the beautiful words spoken by my two sons during the first six years of their lives. This box is a powerful portal into a time when their words were filled with awe and wonder. With the box in hand, I quickly ushered my youngest son to the couch. Together we opened the lid and began our journey.

As my son and I laughed at the silly and candid phrases that he had spoken, I began to realize that somewhere along the way I had lost the joy of my sons’ words. Now at ages 12 and 13, I’m usually telling my boys to be quiet and stop talking so I can think! Does it seem odd in this digital era to capture the words of my children on paper cards?

A recipe for loving language

Well, I will forever treasure the holding of these cards and eagerly passing them between us as we sat reading. Hopefully, the cards will inspire a new sense of wonder in their more grown up voices. 🙂

Thanks again for our talk.

Harriet

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Easing Our Way Back

Easing our way back into Brave Writer

Brave Writer mom, Kristen, writes:

We’re easing our way back into Brave Writer, and have been enjoying [Brave Learner Home] (though I am behind again). We’re using [Building Confidence] with my 5th grade 10yo daughter, with my older son tagging along for the ride, and also reading some of the Arrow books (started with “Mr. Popper’s Penguins”). It’s been a great way to start the year gently, and the kids have been collecting words, though wondering what for.

Today we got to visit our Botanical Gardens and watch a woman extracting the honey from the bee frames. It was awesome, as she even let the kids taste the honeycomb and feel the weight of the full frames. Of course, we had to buy some honey after that!

Then we came home to re-read an old Five in a Row favorite, “The Bee Tree.” I had my kids start gluing and writing on their word tickets as I read, and when we were ready, I set out the book and the bottle of honey and let them find words that went with the story and our honey experience. We had a lot of fun with it. I was proud of the work and thankful for the gentle guidance that tied in perfectly to a field trip day for us. Thank you for the activities you create that lead to success!

You might get amused by this result from our word lists … I’m keeping a list too, as an example, and one of my favorite words is ‘dodecahedron’. (Yes, we’ll be reading “The Phantom Tollbooth” later this year!) Then we started talking about the number prefixes, and the kids loved duodecahedron (20), and I started making up other ones and having them call out what object it would fit.

My daughter was very thoughtful. “You can’t really have a tetrahedron,” she said. Then I reminded her that her dad has one … and has them all the way up to duodecahedrons. (He’s a gamer.) It took her a minute, but she finally realized that his 4-sided die was the tetrahedron … and now we’ve been driving Dad nuts by talking about rolling a duodecahedron for a critical hit! (He knows what they are, but he prefers the gamer talk of d20 or d4 and so on.) Love word play around here!

The colorful paper is just bright index cards, cut to fit the words. (We’re still copying all the words from our written lists, but I thought the magazine words would help them ‘see’ the fun of the word play best for the first go-around.)

Thanks for being such a great support!

Kristen

Brave Writer

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Math–Brave Writer Style!

Math Brave Writer Style

Julie,

I know you’re busier than a one-armed paper hanger this time of year, but I just wanted to jot a quick e-mail to you about math (of all things! ha!) I asked you about math at the Brave Writer conference, and you mentioned that this is a common question. People who love Brave Writer wish, wish, wish someone out there was doing the same thing with math. Well, I haven’t exactly found that person or that program, but I discovered a few things that have rocked our world. I thought you might find it of help as you counsel homeschool moms desperate for help in all areas of their curriculum…

So, the biggest thing is this — The Brave Writer principles apply to math! They do!! Everything you teach us can be directly or indirectly applied to the teaching of math (but you probably already know that??) Partnership math totally changed my 12 year old’s feelings about the subject. Never again will I send him off with a scary page full of problems, a heart full of fear, and that dreadful feeling in the pit of his stomach. When he is learning new concepts or wrestling with old ones, I am there cheering him on and helping him think through the process. There are days when he is independent and days when he is not, and I am ok with that.

Also, the principle of taking little bites of the subject has been such an overwhelmingly successful technique. I had a dear therapist tell me, “Don’t require more than 15 minutes of math exercises a day, unless you want your child to hate math!!” This flies in the face of the common practice of lengthy math lessons that generally take an hour or more per day. Like your suggestion of letting kids write on Post-It notes, there is something powerful about knowing you can stop when the timer goes off & even if it’s hard, it won’t last long!!

Most importantly, I learned what you try so hard to teach through Brave Writer — That writing (and math!) cannot be boiled down to an exact science, a list of do’s and don’ts. If I want my children to love any academic pursuit, I’ve learned that they must have an opportunity to embrace it as an art and not just a science. I no longer follow the traditional “march through the textbook” approach to math. I can’t imagine teaching any other subject that way, so I decided to stop doing that with math. In the same way that you recommend copy work as a foundational practice for learning good writing, we still do practice problems multiple times a week. But that is simply the beginning!! Playing around with problem solving (i.e. math Olympiad style problems) has opened a door to creativity in math that I never would have imagined.

This video from Numberphile explains it best. The mathematician says that so many adults claim that they hated math in school, but what they really hated was what he calls “painting the fence.” The boring routine of memorizing and applying algorithms has historically encompassed the vast majority of math instruction and subsequently sucked the joy out of the subject (as does the scientific approach to teaching writing!). To think that math is so much bigger than that completely blows my mind!!

Anyways, I just wanted to thank you for motivating me to rethink what was happening in my approach to math. The retreat in Cincinnati truly was life-changing for me, for all of us. I walked out of there knowing my approach to math instruction was wrecking my kids, but I didn’t leave empty handed! You gave me the tools I needed to write a different ending to our math story, and I’m so grateful for that. I just want other parents to know that Brave Writer is a lifestyle that can revolutionize any aspect of their homeschool. So the next time you get that “Is there such as thing as Brave Math-er?” question, I hope you’ll confidently tell them that almost every philosophy and method you promote in Brave Writer can be applied to teaching math. It’s just that good.

Grace

Image by Bart Everson (cc cropped, text added)

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Transformation!

Transform

A Brave Writer mom writes:

I am near tears writing this. Ok – I AM in tears. My daughter has been taking your classes for the past year and all I can say is WOW! Last night she was anxiously watching her computer for her grade and was telling me how strongly she now feels about women in combat after doing the research for the Expository Essay Class. She dived into the class like I have never seen her do before. I read her essays and found them to be original and interesting. Brave Writer works. I have hated the formulaic approach my other kids were taught in public school. Brave Writer is transformational.

Also, on your recommendation, I have been doing Winston Grammar with my daughter and she has one lesson left. Her mechanics were at the mid elementary school level when she started last year and now they are – well I don’t know and I don’t care because I can see what she can now produce.

Her success with writing has extended to other areas of school as well. She is enjoying literature more than she ever had – we are reading aloud The Scarlet Letter and she is asking about vocabulary words and is very engaged in our discussions about the book, Hawthorne and the era.

To help my daughter engage in proofreading she has worked her way through Editor in Chief workbooks this year. She started back at their earliest level and has worked through up to high school. I now find only occasional errors. She will work through the high school book this coming year along with the advanced Winston Grammar. She is accomplishing things believed beyond her reach by her old special Ed teachers.

My daughter will be taking Advanced Composition and the MLA Essay Class coming up and she is looking forward to them. I am crying like a fountain as I never thought I would see her excited about school.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart. From deeper than the bottom of my heart!

Brave Writer Mom

Image by Modhamed Malik (cc cropped, text added)

Brave Writer Natural Stages of Growth

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