Welcome to the second blog in our series Homeschooling Days. We’re talking about different activities in our days that we add to make home schooling more exciting, or rewarding for our kids. This is the place for our brilliant teaching strategies and I just want to remind everyone to feel free to add their insight to our forum. Today, we’ll talk about ways to inspire our creative writers.
Ways to Kill the Desire to Write
I find it hard to talk about ways to encourage budding writers without talking about what discourages them. One sure fire way to squash the desire to write is to correct all the mistakes. Don’t get me wrong. I fully recognize that one cannot be a good writer without knowing how to spell, and without having a good command of grammar. However, as much as writing is a process, so is becoming a good writer.
The second way I know of to stifle creativity and impede good writing skills is to have kids write mundane things. Stick only to book reports and summaries of what they’ve read and you will surely turn out a student who hates writing.
The Family Journal
This is my favorite way to teach my kids good writing skills and thus far I have found it to be the most effective. The Family Journal is a common journal in which everyone is able to write and participate in an ongoing conversation. What’s so great about the family journal is the way mistakes are corrected–through modeling rather than through a red ink pen!
My daughter recently wrote this: “mom when are we going to Connecticut”
So I responded: We are going to Connecticut in a few weeks. You must be excited. What do you want to do there?
Lizzy: “I want to go see my cuzins.”
Me: I’m sure your cousins will be thrilled to see you.
I have corrected her without telling her she’s wrong. In this case, it doesn’t impede the conversation and so she’s able to continue writing and subtly you see changes in what she does. I must admit that I started this to just have a means to talk about her feelings with all the recent changes. However, it has become a wonderful educational tool.
Field Trip Responses
One thing we do after field trips is have our kids either write a travel brochure boasting the advantages of coming to that particular location or a newspaper article about something that happened during the day. It allows us to see if they’ve learned anything and it gives them a little bit of a creative outlet.
What are your great ideas for teaching writing? What are the challenges in teaching writing?
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