Here are the ten most popular Brave Writer Life in Brief blog posts published in 2017.
Enjoy!
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.
For this YouTube Thursday, let’s talk about how to make money while still being a homeschool mother (or father!).
In this video:
As well as the four keys to earning money while homeschooling.
Did you miss any videos from the Brave Writer YouTube channel last month? We’ve got you covered. Check out these great videos about the benefits of online classes for your homeschool and how to put the “home” back in homeschool.
Haven’t registered for Fall classes with Brave Writer yet? REGISTER HERE.
by Homeschool Alliance coach Stephanie Elms
Nothing feels more critical than picking a curriculum or choosing a homeschool approach—we homeschool parents put so much time and energy (and worry!) into the decision! The good news is that families can and do make all forms of education work and there is nothing inherently right or wrong with whatever choices we try.
That said, sometimes our expectations of what homeschooling “should” look like can affect whether or not what we choose works for us. We naturally go into the process with a variety of expectations, such as having happy, compliant kids, maintaining a certain level of organization or having peaceful days filled with productive learning.
The kids are anything but happy and compliant. We can’t seem to stay on top of it all despite our best efforts. Our day feels anything but peaceful as we get pulled this way and that by life’s ups and downs.
Then the doubt sets in. We start second guessing ourselves and telling ourselves that we or our kids are just not cut out for doing this. We wonder why we are struggling when it seems like everyone else has this all figured out.
So what do we do when this doubt inevitably creeps in? As paradoxically as it might seem, the more that we can “accept what is” and let go of our expectations, the easier it is to figure out a path forward.
We can trust that uncertainty is not a sign that we are doing something wrong but rather a natural (and integral) part of how the homeschooling process works.
We can learn to make peace with that uncertainty recognizing that it comes with the territory.
We can use these moments of self-doubt as opportunities to work on letting go of our illusion of control and as a reminder that we can trust that things will be okay.
So take a deep breath and remember that everything is not solely dependent on you. It is okay if you don’t do everything perfectly. It is okay if you don’t know exactly how everything will turn out.
Because that is where the magic happens—in the process of:
Lucky for us, homeschooling is not about having it all figured out but rather about the process of discovery along the way.
