Archive for the ‘Young Writers’ Category

Is Your Child in the Jot It Down Stage?

Brave Writer Jot It Down

Jotting down what your kids tell you isn’t a short cut to writing. It IS writing.

Does your child:

  • excitedly share stories and experiences but is blocked when trying to write them down?
  • have a more sophisticated vocabulary than what they write?
  • refuse to pen more than a word or two at one time?
  • struggle with handwriting or spelling?

If you answered yes to any of these then your child may be in the Jot It Down stage.

Kids in that stage are often between the ages of five and eight, but age doesn’t matter so much. What matters is where they are in the Natural Stages of Growth.

Brave Writer

If your child is in the Jot It Down stage:

  • Forget all the scopes and sequences.
  • Focus on love, joy, and self-expression.
  • Read books together.
  • Watch movies together.
  • Have big, juicy conversations.
  • Play with words.
  • Catch your child in the act of thinking or storytelling and write down what he says.
  • Let her dictate with you acting as secretary.
  • With your child’s permission, share some of his thoughts and stories with family and friends.

This is how you slowly help your child see the value of putting thoughts into writing.

So, each time something happy or interesting happens, jot it down. Pay attention to your kids—as in, pay attention to their happiness quota.

  • Play games
  • Have tea
  • Laugh at jokes
  • Record the clever things your child says
  • Have them write one beautiful word a day instead of a whole passage
  • Use gel pens and brightly colored paper sprayed with perfume!

Continue to learn handwriting and spelling but do that through copywork not your child’s original thoughts.

Brave Writer

Jot It Down stage in action!

Need more support?

Check out Brave Writer’s Jot It Down! Writing Projects.

Brave Writer Jot It Down

Posted in BW products, Natural Stages of Growth in Writing, Young Writers | Comments Off on Is Your Child in the Jot It Down Stage?

Keen Observation

TomatoImage by Steve Hankins

Here’s a fabulous description of the Keen Observation process! This is precisely what is supposed to happen when you use the exercise.

Brave writer mom, Kellie, writes:

Hi Julie,

I’m new to BWL, just printed Writers Jungle Sunday and read through to chapter 6, prowled your website and blog and am now dabbling in some of your recommended pre-free-writing exercises. I’m blown away with the keen observation exercise experience that we had today and felt like I needed to express my gratitude for your insightful, common sense approach to breaking the writing process down into manageable, fun activities.

My daughter 8, and I explored a garden tomato today. She has never been a lover of this fruit mind you. Ketchup and spaghetti sauce, forget about it. But, for some reason she was looking forward to slicing it open and sampling it’s flavor. Maybe it has something to do with the theory she’s subscribing to about how every 7 years you grow new taste buds so your taste in food may change. Whatever her reasons, I’m glad she was a go.

She was so quick to start describing the “ruby red“ tomato with “super tiny yellow dots on top that makes it golden red“ with a “green crown“  that I didn’t get to ask her the first few questions you supply us with.  Okay, so she was excited to play this “game” but the kicker was after she took a considerable sized  bite out of it and tasted the seeds separate from the flesh. The bite was described as “Yuck it tastes sour and tart”  the seeds as “at first it’s the yuck of the tomato but then it’s a little burst of sweet” There was a goodly amount of juice left on the plate “juice went flying out of it” when sliced, so I asked her to slurp some up.  Moments later she was sprawled on the ground with a puckered up face declaring “I thought it would be bland but it was so powerful it blew my head right off.  My tongue was bursting with strong tart and sour”  She was such a good sport that even after the assault on her mouth she was game for tackling the skin which was “smooth and tough with a bland flavor”.

We thoroughly enjoyed this exercise. We laughed, we joked, we bonded, we praised. Thank you for your courage in sharing.

Sincerely,
Kellie

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The First Developmental Stage: “I Can’t Wait to Start!”

The First Developmental Stage:

I’m thinking about the developmental stages of growth in homeschooling; I’m thinking about the ways our growth parallels our children’s and how we forget to account for the fact that we are learning as we go, too.

The “I can’t wait to start” stage: That’s you if your child is 5 or under and you already know you’ll homeschool. It’s as if your child can’t grow up fast enough to let you begin! You’ve done your research, you may already have workbooks lined up, you may have already “played school” with this little tiny kidlet who mostly wants to wear tiaras to bed and climb too-tall walls to walk on—not sit at a table clawing a pencil, dragging it across a page, shaping that frustrating letter ‘q.’

When these moms call, they universally want to know how to “get their kids” to sit still or care about school or make progress. They worry that they are behind (they really do). Their kids are usually “advanced” which often means that they are exhibiting the brilliance that is FIVE YEARS OLD. After all, five-year-olds are incredible human beings. They are developing vocabulary at a rate they will never repeat. They are acquiring information faster than they ever will again. It’s an amazing age for brain development. And it happens whether you homeschool it or not!

Veteran homeschoolers would say to the “I can’t wait to start” parents: “Slow down! It’s like you’re sprinting on mile one of a very long marathon. Save some for later.”

Meanwhile, the best curriculum for the under 5 set (and even up til 7-8, really) is still dress up clothes and face paints.

You’re at home. Stop waiting for a chance to “teach.” You already are! You want your child to learn to write? Write notes to your child. Tuck them under his pillow. Put them in your daughter’s hidey hole where she plays with her Legos. Write riddles on the white board and read them to your kids at breakfast, then solve them together.

Read the ingredients off the back of the cereal box and see if you can spot the same word (“fructose” for example) on each box. Make it a race to find a word that looks just like that on every box in the house…even non-readers can kinda help! And will want to.

Find your daughter’s first initial all day long in every book, on every billboard, in every flyer that crosses your path.

Let your kids dictate emails to you that you send on their behalf to grandparents or aunts and uncles.

Read, read, read to your kids. Not just books on the couch. Not just library books. Read the notice boards at the zoo that describe the animals, read the magazine headlines at the supermarket while you stand in line, read the traffic signs as you drive, read the instructions for how to play a game out loud, read the funny Facebook post you just read, read the text you sent to their other parent…

You want writers and readers? Read and write with your kids, on your way, as you go, all the time. USE these skills. They live in your life right now.

How did you teach your kids to tie their shoes? With a book? With two-dimensional pictures of shoe-tying? No. You got down on the ground and started tying shoes, together. (Or you bought clogs and bypassed the whole thing until your daughter was in tenth grade and finally had to tie a pair of shoes without her mother being present. Yeah, that happened. In our family.)

My point is this: if you can’t wait to start—stop and consider if you haven’t already begun, just by being a parent! If you want to include the conventional subject areas about math and reading and writing, take the same strategy. No need to wrestle a four year old to the kitchen table to “do school.” No need to spend big money on a history curriculum for a five year old.

Live, be, do, share, enthuse, pay attention, play, take trips, dress up, read, write, calculate, take naps, eat food, tickle, cuddle, and be patient.

If you really really really must “start”—whatever that means to you (because you can’t help yourself)—by all means, home educate yourself. Buy books, sit at a table and fill them out, keep records of all you are learning about history, math, science, and language. Teach yourself by the very methods you wish you could foist on your kids. Use those methods, and those materials, in those subject areas, for yourself.

And wait. Save your kids from school a little longer. Include the subjects you want them to learn “along the way, as you go, in the mainstream of your life.”

If you need some support (are plum out of ideas, Family Fun magazine used to be great – may still be, haven’t checked lately, and Jot It Down by Brave Writer seeks to be that kind of resource for you).

Enjoy this phase! It goes too fast!

Image by Brave Writer mom Carmen

Posted in Developmental Stages of Growth, Homeschool Advice, Young Writers | 4 Comments »

Best Curriculum for a Six Year Old

Brave Writer Best Curriculum for Six Year Old

From a dear local Mom:

Hi Julie, I’m in Cincinnati and regularly follow your blog posts and was wondering how you structure homeschool so it will be fun? My son is six and we’re jumping back into school gradually (using your method of focusing on one thing at a time) but he’s already saying he hates school and sighs when I just bring out the little math book and ask that we only work on it for five minutes... Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide. ~Cincy Mom

Hi Cincy Mom!

The best curriculum for a six year old is face paints and dress up clothes.

Read aloud.

Go to the art museum here. Use this post as a guide to how to enjoy art together.

Sign up for zoo passes and during the fall season, go once a week.

Visit the library every single week. Let him pick out story books, you pick out books, you create times to read together on the couch, you have poetry teatimes together.

Count cracks in the sidewalk, blue houses, red cars, all the jellybeans you can hold in two hands at once, cups of sugar to bake muffins.

Play with Playdoh—make all the lowercase letters of the alphabet. Now make all the uppercase. Say the sounds as you do and try to make every sound seem like an animal is saying it. Or every Star Wars character.

Buy Lego sets.

Take nature walks. Find a field guide and look for birds to match.

Jot down the incredibly cute and funny things he says to you and read them aloud to family or friends.

Play with pencils and pens and crayons and white boards and paints. See what it feels like to write in big sloppy ways and small careful ways.

Using a big paintbrush with water: write names on the hot concrete, and little messages as they vanish in the sun and read them to him.

Make pictograms and see if he can guess your messages.

Put away the workbooks.

Put away the schedule.

Be with your son the same ways you have been since he was born. If you homeschool, get rid of “school” and focus on home.

Add brownies.

Read as much as you can here.

If you want some support on how to make this journey, try our Jot It Down product. It will be the one thing that may save you from over-schooling at this tender age.

Let go. Relax. Trust. He’s so young. Be curious about the world in front of your son.

Hugs to you, conscientious Mama. You can do this.

Julie

The best curriculum for a six year old
is face paints and dress up clothes.

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Posted in Email, Homeschool Advice, Young Writers | 15 Comments »

Catch Your Child in the Act of Thinking

Catch Your Child in the Act of Thinking

This is a great time of year to catch your child in the act of narrating—expressing a thought, experience, or the content of a movie. When your child hits the white heat of language (you know it’s happening because he or she is animated and interrupting your phone call), you want to jot it down right then. Stop driving, stir frying dinner, or chatting with Melinda. Grab the back of an envelope or the random super market receipt and start writing, quick as a flash. Get the words as best you can.

If your child asks you what you’re doing, this is what you say:

“Keep going. This is so good, I want to get it down in your own words before I forget it. I want to share it with ________ (Dad, Mom, Grandma, sister, my best friend…).”

Then later in the same day (maybe at dinner when the family is gathered), say this:

“Today Arthur told me the funniest story about Rocky and how he chases the squirrels in the backyard. I wanted to get it right so I wrote it down. I want to read it to you.”

Then read it. Enjoy it. Talk about the contents. Ask Arthur questions related to the story of the contents (don’t talk about writing). Then put it away and eat dinner.

Make this a practice you return to again and again (not every day or even every other day, but when it’s worth it to capture in writing something meaningful your child says). You can even jot down the names of all the Lego men your child makes, or how your daughter explains the instructions to playing Wii bowling. These are also useful and important to write.

Eventually, your child discovers that what’s going on in his or her head IS what you want to see in writing. They start to realize that what is going on inside of them is worthy of print and sharing. They discover that writing is an extension of themselves, not a foreign language or practice to be mastered.

If you keep it up, your kids will take over and do it for each other and you won’t even realize that they’ve picked up the habit until they greet you at the front door saying, “Mom, Mom, Caitrin wrote her first story.” Then your older daughter will hand you the carefully transcribed narrative that her younger sister told her at bedtime.

That’s how it works.

Also consider our Jot It Down! product. It gives you ten original writing projects you can do with your children. These are activities (one per month) that enable you to focus the original writing impulse in a specific direction (fairly tales or writing letters or issuing party invitations). They are delight-driven writing activities and cover a range of writing skills. And your child never has to lift a pencil!

Or check out our Jot It Down! bundle and save.

Image of mother and child by Ed Garcia (cc)

Posted in Homeschool Advice, Young Writers | 2 Comments »