Friday Freewrite: Finish this sentence—If I boarded a sailboat in Miami… Go!
Be Gentle with Grammar
Today’s word advice: Don’t be the Grammar Patrol.
It’s so much more important to preserve relationships, to receive the intended communication rather than to enforce proper usage in texting, social media, freewrites, message boards, or any quick writing that does not rise to the level of some kind of permanence.
Yes, every day people write “your” and mean “you’re” or they write “here” when they meant “hear” or “loose” when they meant “lose.” I “would of come” is hard to read. I admit. But if I say it out loud, I know what it means.
The purpose of all writing and speaking is to convey
- information,
- ideas,
- feelings,
- thoughts.
When your child risks self-expression and fails to get the grammar right, you can be the one who focuses on the content rather than the grammar conventions. If the issue recurs, you can point it out in a gentle way days later:
“By the way, did you know that it’s ‘would have’ not ‘would of’? Funny how the way we speak has made it hard to hear the original grammatical structure.”
There’s nothing inherently superior about being “right” about grammar. It just means you have that area of information mastered and someone else doesn’t. So be kind. Please. No one likes to be corrected for the errant apostrophe in “it’s” or the mistaken “there.”
But all of us like to be heard.
Brave Writer’s Groovy Grammar Workshop empowers parents
to implement a natural approach to teaching grammar.
Summer Class Registration is today!
Check out the class list here: Summer Class Schedule.
Please send registration information via email to [email protected]. Include the following:
Name
Email address
Student name
Age
Class
How you’d like to pay
Phone number
To pay with Paypal, simply go to Paypal.com, select the Send Money option. Send the correct amount to [email protected]. Indicate which class you are paying for and which student. We’ll take care of the rest.
Call (513) 307-1405 or email if you have any difficulties.
Friday Freewrite: Money matters
How would you spend $50.00 if you were asked to spend it on three people in your family. The money has to be spent on them (not secretly for you) and can be divided in any way you like. However, you may not spend it on a “group” item or an item that overlaps for two or three of the people. Each person will receive something from that $50.00 expenditure. Go!
Podcast: Jot It Down
This Brave Writer podcast is the first in a series where we look at each of the natural developmental stages of growth in writing. Today’s stage: Jot It Down!
In my years of working with families, I’ve found that it is much more effective to look at how writers grow naturally than to focus on scope and sequence, grade level, ages, or the types of writing that ought to be done in some “established sequence.”
Learn more about how to identify where your children are in that course of development and take the stress away from the writing journey you share with each other.
Jot It Down!
A year-long language arts program for 5–8 year olds (age range is approximate).
Jot It Down! gives you step by step instructions through developmentally appropriate writing projects. It provides 10 month-long writing projects that maximize a child’s narrating skills, while their thoughts and ideas are transcribed by the parent.
Pair Jot It Down! with Growing Brave Writers.
Ready for more?
Below are links to the complete Stages of Growth in Writing podcast series.
Jot It Down!
Partnership Writing
Building Confidence
Transition to Ownership Part 1
Transition to Ownership Part 2
Eavesdropping on the Great Conversation
