Archive for the ‘Young Writers’ Category

Tired of Writing? Make a List!

Writing Lists

Writing wears kids out, have you noticed?

Children may get that burst of linguistic energy working for them (when the inspiration strikes, they’re hard to stop!), but when they’re done, they’re done. Sometimes after a successful writing project, all anyone wants to do is lie about doing nothing.

While taking some time off, or while your kids aren’t quite proficient enough to write lengthy passages of prose, you might try writing lists. Lists can be an incredibly therapeutic way to interact with language. For one thing, there is no shortage of topics for lists.

Here’s a list (ha!) of what you might list:

  • birds
  • roller coasters
  • Lego sets
  • favorite lines of poetry
  • seeds to plant in the garden
  • items to purchase for a bedroom redesign
  • hairstyles to try
  • funny jokes
  • not-so-funny jokes
  • words that rhyme with…
  • famous lines of Shakespeare
  • the original old English vocabulary in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (with translations)
  • items in a junk drawer
  • all the vocabulary needed to sew a quilt
  • favorite TV shows
  • past American Idol contestants and when they were voted off
  • types of tanks used in WWII
  • American Girl trousseau items

As you can see, there is no limit to what can be listed!

Lists allow your kids to continue to work on handwriting, vocabulary development, categorizing, ordering, and information gathering. They also offer a place to house disparate thoughts or ideas or fantasies. It’s nice to keep a list of all the things you’d buy if you had $100.00. Cheaper than spending the dough-re-mi!

Lists can be kept in notebooks, on white boards, on sheets of paper. My daughter kept a list on her bedroom wall (all the friends she had and something funny about them).

Lists often mushroom into sub categories too: birds in my backyard, birds I saw on vacation in Florida, birds I saw at the zoo, birds that live at the beach.

So get out a notepad and start a list.

P.S. I love the little moleskin notebooks that fit inside a purse for listing, jotting down words, keeping my thoughts together so that anywhere I am, I can write them down. Your kids might like that too – a portable list!

The Homeschool Alliance

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Copywork Quotations, Games, Homeschool Advice, Language Arts, Nature Walks, Unschooling, Words!, Writing Exercises, Young Writers | Comments Off on Tired of Writing? Make a List!

Reading and Writing – a match made in linguistic heaven

Reading and Writing

Seems like I’ve had a spate (what a great word!) of emails asking about reading and writing, and the connection between these subject areas. So let’s tackle it.

Reading is the single most important part of your homeschool.

It matters not if your children read or you read to them. What matters more than anything is that they are repeatedly immersed in written language. (I’ll talk about learning to read in a moment.) Written language has its own cadence. It differs from conversation. Conversational language is stacatto, is inflected by facial movements and vocal intonations, is accompanied by body language and is contextual (often replying to words, ideas known to both speakers).

Written language can’t see your face, can’t hear your reactions. It takes nothing for granted. The whole world it seeks to share must be conjured by magic – the magic of words. Reading to your kids, ensuring that they read every day, does more to shape how they will write than any workbook, writing course, or curricula. I will repeat that because no one believes it on the first pass:

Reading every day is the best writing program you can “buy.”

So now we can talk about how and why it works. Language acquisition is largely intuitive. It comes from “hearing” and “mimicking.” When your kids learn to speak their native tongue, they are incorporating sounds, movements, intonations and facial expressions into their spoken words. We crack up as much at their surprising use of volume, deadpan humor, commands and sophistication at ages 2-3 as we do at their word choices. They combine so many different aspects of communication into their words that we hardly notice (they are hitting all the right intuitive strokes, and even risking a few that are beyond their maturity or grasp).

Written language functions in a similar way. The more you read, the more you become conditioned to detailed description, to housing your dialog in attributive tags, to building suspense, to attaching meaning to an idea through the use of metaphor. These “habits” are the intonation patterns of written language. They are as natural to natural writers as raising an eyebrow to convey suspicion is to native speakers.

However, you don’t see all the fruit of that reading in year one. Just like speaking takes at least five years to master sufficiently to be considered “fluent,” writing requires at least that long and then some, due to its unique delivery method (learning to manage a pencil and all the mechanics of writing is more challenging than syncing your tongue, teeth and vocal chords). So I say: give it ten years instead. Signs of mimicry will erupt sooner than that (and for those, be grateful!). Still, to become a fluent, competent writer takes ten years. Reading is essential for shaping the intuitive inner ear that tells the writer that he or she is speaking the right language.

So what if your child isn’t reading? We have three kids who read late: 8 1/2, nearly 9, and 10+. We had two early readers: 6 1/2 and 7. All five of them are avid, fluent readers now. In fact, I noticed that the reading of lengthy chapter books started at around age 11 with all five kids, no matter when they began reading. Our youngest read latest! Go figure.

Regardless of when they began reading for themselves, though, I have always read aloud to them. We’ve read novels, non-fiction books, the Bible, poetry, Shakespeare, comic books and picture books, websites, and instruction manuals. I used to read about an hour a day to them from a variety of sources. It’s the one thing we never failed to do.

So today, carve out that time. Put aside writing, spelling, even that essential math book. Read aloud today and every day.

Tell yourself that if you read to your children, you did homeschool them today.

The Arrow language arts program

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Family Notes, Homeschool Advice, Young Writers | Comments Off on Reading and Writing – a match made in linguistic heaven

Forums: How it works

The following is posted on the Brave Writer public forums. I loved it! Such a great example of how it’s supposed to work. 🙂

Today, I wanted my nine year old to really get into telling a story so rather than bog him down with the handwriting, I figured I would type for him while he dictated his story.

At the breakfast table this morning, we developed a character. I started off by saying the character was a boy. Then he added a detail about the character, then I did, and so on until we had quite a description going of this kid who lives in a jungle and has a pet monkey.

Then this afternoon, I grabbed my laptop and we hit the couch and curled up with blankets and pillows for him to “write” his story. I started him off with the typical “One day…” and he took it from there.

It was a bit of a struggle to begin with but then he was cruising and had so many thoughts flying out of his mouth. After I had typed a whole page, he said he was out of ideas but the story was at a cliffhanger moment actually so I told him that was enough and we could call it Chapter One.

He was so excited by the whole process. He has been running around all afternoon with his story that we printed off. He even decided to start a new club with his 6 year old sister called “The Story Club.” He asked if he could use my laptop and they both sat at the kitchen table while he guided her through the process of developing her own character. He typed while she dictated. Now, he can’t really type so this was a long laborious process but he was not deterred. My daughter lost interest before he did which I was surprised at as he had to do the typing. So he saved her character and I have a feeling they will come back to it another day.

I’m looking forward to him continuing his story and having fun with his imagination and words!

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Email, Young Writers | Comments Off on Forums: How it works

Writing Your Revision Feedback

Writing Your Revision Feedback
One of the ways we help moms in our primary writing course, The Writer’s Jungle Online, is to give them an understanding of how to affirm the good and enhance the weak in their children’s writing. Because the classes are in an online format, all of our communication with parents is through writing. We read the work done by your children and then we comment on it by posting our thoughts almost line by line.

A parent can then print the post and have a concrete record of the steps to take to improve the writing with the child. The written revision notes, in turn, provide a model for future interactions with your child when you are on your own.

Part of what makes the class feedback so powerful for both you and your child is that it is thorough. It goes through the draft systematically:

  • asking questions of the text,
  • noting clever uses of language or insightful ideas,
  • identifying the places where a few more thoughts, words or sentences would expand the meaningfulness of the content,
  • noting which part of the piece might serve as an opening hook, and so on.

A parent can read this feedback and take it, evaluate it, then make use of it with her child. But she can also print it and hand it to the child to be read together as a way to discuss editorial feedback. In this case, the pair has triangled in a third party and it is easier to evaluate the comments together, sitting on the same side of the fence than when it is mother directly to child.

Still, once class is over, some moms revert to the habit of quick, verbal feedback that is offered right as the draft is finished, with little time to pause and enjoy the original act of creation. Other moms, though, have discovered that they can approximate the experience of that nurturing environment by emulating that process!

One way to do this is to always type the draft/freewrite into a Word doc. Then, later in the day when you are alone away from your child, give it the kind of attention a KWB instructor might. Go line by line looking for those places you can offer affirmation and positive feedback. Type that in, including smilie faces and exclamation points! As you find places that show insufficient development, ask for more. You can write, “I love this. I’d love to hear more about it. What else happened that day?” When you stumble across an alliterative word pair, highlight it saying, “Great repeated use of the “h” sound here!”

As you write the feedback, you’ll become calmer and you’ll also discover that your eye when you read naturally gravitates to error rather than strength. But giving your child’s paper enough respect to write your feedback, you’ll slow down and become more aware at the successes within it; the makings of a good paper.

When you have typed up your comments right in between all the original writing (using a different color or italics or bold), print it out. Get some tea, cookies and a pencil. Then sit with your child over the yummy treats and read it together. Talk about the feedback you give and allow your child to offer you his or her perspective on what you wrote. This kind of discussion enables you to use the paper as the triangling force so that you and your child remain on the “same side” of the discussion.

For those who really want to see this process in action, I strongly urge you to take The Writer’s Jungle Online. It is repeatedly the key step in the process to becoming an excellent writing coach and ally for your kids.

When I’m asked whether it is better to purchase The Writer’s Jungle (an excellent resource for the self-directed, to be sure) or to take the online class, if you have to choose between them, I always recommend the class. It is the best way for you to become fluent in the skills of coaching writing.

The Writer's Jungle Online

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Reluctant Revisers

Reluctant Revisers

Julie-
I am posting here in response to the “Brave Revising” email, you sent out.

I am wondering about reluctant revisers. My 12 year old daughter will free write beautifully and willingly , but resists my input on revising. I feel like I am judging her work when I do offer suggestions.

I am considering taking the revising course, but would love to hear what you have to say about gently and effectively revising.
Thanks.
Anne

Great question Anne!

Revising, for most kids, feels like criticism. They take it personally when errors are found in their writing. Yet find them we do and we can’t very well ignore glaring mistakes in punctuation or grammar, don’t want to overlook the opportunity to encourage more details or facts.

So let’s start with the philosophy of revision so that you can rethink how you might go about fostering a safe space for it:

Revision is not the same as mopping up the mechanics. Editing is the final step in a paper and that’s when your eyes get to be really picky about what they see. That final step means going over the typing (or handwriting) with a fine-toothed comb, looking for errors to clean up right at the last minute. The content will stay as it is.

Revision, on the other hand, is about reshaping the original piece. Its focus is the content and how to narrow vague ideas, how to expand poorly developed ones, how to reorganize the piece to flow with more power and so on.

Most of the time, the mistake we parents make is that we move from draft to editing in one step. Or we might move to revising and editing at the same time. When a child risks writing and shares content with you, if the first thing you notice is the misspelled word, the child literally feels insulted and hurt (like you missed the point!). Let me give you an example of how it feels:

What if you had dolled yourself up for an evening out with your husband: new hair style, brand new shoes, glittery top, slinky pants… and when you appeared in the room, he said, “Aren’t you going to wear the earrings I bought you?” or worse, “You’ve got lipstick on your teeth.” Rather than being bowled over by the original impact of your overall look, he notices first thing what you didn’t wear or he points out the one mistake in the look (something that could easily be corrected moments later after he tells you how amazing you look).

If he had simply expressed his amazement at how great you looked first, you’d probably be more than happy to consider adding his earrings to the ensemble. And of course you’d want to know about the lipstick on your teeth before you left the house. It’s just, those are not the first things you want noticed after all that work to surprise and amaze your husband.

With writing, your kids are risking their precious insights, words, knowledge, ideas every time they commit them to paper. Your first task, then, is to notice! Find the quirky idea, vocabulary word or fresh insight and praise it! Be impressed by the amount of writing (no matter how much is there). Engage the material with follow-up questions that show you are interested in more of their ideas (not to elicit “better” material, but to show that you really do care about the topic and are impressed with what they know about it).

Once you’ve done that, on another day you can tackle the revision needs. Here are a couple of principles to keep in mind when you go to help with revision.

1. The writer is the author and therefore has final editorial control.

That means you are offering ideas and suggestions, not giving commands or edicts.

2. Your suggestions for improvement are better framed as options to consider.

When you read along, it works better to say, “I loved this part that details the preparation of the meal. I’m wondering about the colors of the foods in this particular recipe. What are they? Do you think that might add a little more detail to the original?” Invite dialog around your suggestions and ask their opinions. You can offer to jot little notes in the margin so they don’t forget what you discussed together.

3. Ask your children for their ideas for revision.

Sometimes we assume that they have none, that they are satisfied with the writing as is. Truth is, if they get a few days away from the draft, they may find that when they come back to the draft, they have fresh energy and eyes and are interested in expanding it or enhancing it with more detail.

4. Which brings me to my most important point: Separate revision from drafting.

Never do them on the same day. Spend time enjoying and praising the draft on one day. Then let a couple days go by before revisiting the piece with revision ideas.

5. Save all editing (mechanics, punctuation, grammar, spelling, typos) for the end, once all revising is done.

Resist the temptation to correct as you go. Unless your child spontaneously corrects them upon review, you are to keep your hands in your pockets. Editing is the final step that is done after you are thoroughly finished with revising.

6. Remember: not everything has to be addressed in this paper.

Expand, enhance, correct, improve one or two things and leave the rest. The problems in this paper will magically reappear in future writing to be addressed then. We homeschool parents tend to expect perfection every time. Totally unnecessary in writing development. Allow for the growth in writing to be a journey through multiple pieces of writing, not just this one.

Partnership Writing

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Young Writers | 4 Comments »