Simple Step By Step Guide to Homeschool Writing

Hi, this is Sheri from the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com where I share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'm going to be sharing today a simple step-by-step guide for homeschool writing. If you're new to my channel, I am a former public school teacher turned homeschool mom. I'm a mom to nine kids and one on the way. I've been married to my high school sweetheart for 22 years. I love encouraging other moms in their homeschool journeys. This is our 13th year homeschooling, so I feel like we've been through the gamut of ups and downs. I know what it's like to be in the beginning, to be doubting yourself and just not sure if this is going to work, not sure how this is going to turn out, and then I know what it's like to see the benefits of a slower pace of family life, of kids being able to learn individually and at their own pace. I know what it's like to come up against struggles and to think, is this just not working anymore? What should we do? Where do we go from here? And we've managed to just kind of keep going and plugging away and figuring out solutions along the way. So I like to encourage other moms with some of the things that I've learned from homeschooling over the past several years. Before we can expect our kids to begin learning the writing process, we need to create an environment for them that fills their mind with ideas and thoughts. And we do this by reading to them, reading a lot. When you read to your kids in short snippets throughout the day, you are giving them a vast library of ideas and thoughts and ways of living and cultures, ways to do things. We can't expect kids to express something that they don't possess. They have to have lots of thoughts. They have to go places. They have to have things to talk about to be able to express their feelings and express their thoughts. And we do this through reading to them. If you want your child to be a good writer, you will read to them a lot. Good writers are good readers. What should you read to them? Read fiction. Read non-fiction. Read chapter books. Even to young children like preschoolers, they can understand chapter books in just small, small portions every day. Read poetry. Memorize scripture. Learn songs. These are all ways to create a environment for your kids. Of course, the first actual step in learning to write is handwriting. You can do this very simply, teaching them a letter a day. You can use just a simple manuscript tablet that you can buy at any dollar store and just slowly teach them letter by letter. We have used Handwriting Without Tears. This is a program that is very simple. The one thing I love about Handwriting Without Tears is that it's developmentally appropriate. The kids learn letters by learning their capitals first and then their smalls. The capitals they learn through understanding the difference between a big line, a small line, a big curve, and a small curve. They even have blocks that you can use to put your letters together with just this big line, small line, big curve, small curve. Once you're putting the blocks together to make letters, then they have finger tracing, which is great for young kids. Then they teach them their capital letters sequentially in order of what would be easiest for them to learn. Of course, first would be, for example, maybe F because it's a big line and two small lines. Then E. The next one might be D, which would be a big line and moving on to a big curve. Then eventually you would get to small curves. I really like the way that Handwriting Without Tears progresses for kids. This is something I initially used in the beginning. Over time, I have kind of just learned their method and have been using a manuscript tablet to teach my kids. An important thing to note in handwriting is that most printed letters begin at the top. Not every one of them, but most of them begin at the top. That's a nice little rule for kids to follow and to help them write their letters appropriately. I also think it's really important to wait to teach kids to write until they have some good, gross, and fine motor skills. If you are starting to teach handwriting too early when they're not ready, it's just going to make so much more work for you. It's going to be a headache. You're not going to enjoy it and it's going to take a lot longer. But some signs that your child is ready to write would be just watching them sitting at the table trying to sketch something on paper or if you see them trying to make symbols or trying to write their name. These would all be signs that they are ready and interested. After they learn to write their capital and small letters, this is when I would teach them to write some small words. So begin with three-letter words. Cat. Ham. Box. Just list out words and I would take just a couple days in a row for a while until, you know, you can write out several three-letter words. They can copy them. They're copying their letters correctly. Give them a chance to write the capitals and smalls from beginning to end. See how they're forming their letters and if it's becoming easier for them. Once kids can write basic words, it's time for them to move on to the next step, which is copy work. Our kids learn to read through Bob books. So as soon as they have mastered handwriting and writing small words, I have them, after they finish reading their Bob book for the day, copy one sentence from the Bob book and usually I write it out for them in their manuscript tablet and they copy from what I have written. Copywork is such a genius idea. It's very simple. It's great because kids can do it independently and yet there's just so many skills that it covers. It teaches so many things and it's easy. It's a way for them to do writing on their own and yet to learn so much. If you think about how you learn anything, we learn by imitation. The grand goal is to be able to communicate well. Of course, not all kids are going to like writing or are going to be great writers, but all kids are going to need to communicate in the adult world. So we want our kids to be good communicators. How do we do that? We do that by imitating those who do it well. This is what copywork is. Copywork is copying the best pieces from great authors. So for us, what this looks like is copying one sentence a day in first grade, two sentences a day in second grade, three sentences and so on in third grade. This is a great pattern. This is something that they are usually ready and able to do at these stages. I have a whole list on the blog of copywork that we use in our home that you can find and download if you would like to try it. It's based mostly on the books from amblesideonline.com, which are all classic books of literature. Books that even if you don't use Ambleside, your child is probably reading or you're probably reading to them at some point. You can copy scripture, poems, just sections from famous speeches. They can copy parts from your favorite chapter book. You can go through and find just some really good lines for them to copy. You can also just do a google search for copywork and there's just there's so much out there that your child can copy. Make sure it's something that's a quality writing that's going to stimulate their thinking. So much is covered in copywork. Vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, even just understanding and observing writing styles and written form, dialogue. When you are copying, you're picking up on these things. I think copywork is great even for adults and if you don't believe this, then I would just challenge you to try it for yourself. I've done it. I've found just maybe a quote that I really love or something that I just think is just really meaningful and I will write that down writing it by hand and it will come back to me. I will think about it throughout the day. There's something about writing something down that helps you to remember it. I like to compare it to riding in a car versus walking somewhere. When you're riding in a car, you're probably going to pick up a couple different landmarks and see a couple different things and remember the road, but if you walk to that same place, you are going to observe so much more. You're going to take in so much more and when you write something by hand, I think the same process applies. You are slowing your brain down. You are just seeing things up close. So I think copywork has so many benefits for children who are learning to write. How often should they do copywork? I think they should do copywork daily. It should be something that is a habit for them. That's just part of their daily checklist. Copywork is something that you may not see the results immediately, but you see it over several years and I've observed this in my kids and it's why I just truly believe that copywork is so effective. After kids are copying great pieces from authors, they can move on and you can add some extensions to your copywork. One of the first ones that we add is cursive. Now I realize that cursive is kind of out of vogue. A lot of schools aren't requiring anymore. People think it's not necessarily important. I still value the skill of writing cursive. I think when kids learn to write cursive, they are obviously able to read cursive. It also will help them in the future to be able to read historical documents. Before you learned to write in cursive, you couldn't read cursive. It just looked like a whole bunch of squiggly lines and waves and things like that. So is cursive necessary to function in the modern world? I'm sure many would argue that it's not. I still value it. I think it's a great thing for kids to learn and once our kids are writing well, they can do copywork with ease, we have them, I have them move on and write their copywork in cursive. I think it's great to improve their skills. It has the same effect as far as slowing down the thought process in the brain and truthfully most of my kids want to learn cursive. They see cursive when I write checks or when I write in cursive and they just want that skill. They want to be able to do it. Another extension of copywork is typing and typing is a skill that's really important for them to learn because they'll be using it throughout their life to text, email. Our whole world is now so technological that they're going to need to learn to type. We use the keyboarding tutorials from senselang.org and we found these really helpful. They have a nice progression. The kids just start with learning to type with their pointer fingers, then you add two fingers and so on and then extend it from there and then by the, I think there are 16 lessons, by the 16th lesson they are writing full sentences using capitalization and punctuation and they're really ready to type on their own. I have them do this for about 10 minutes a day and when they complete all the tutorials and they're able to write on their own, then I use this as an extension of their daily copywork. After they complete their daily copywork, I have them get on the computer. They're no longer doing the keyboarding tutorials and instead they copy their handwritten copywork, which if they're in, for example, maybe third or fourth grade, this is just a short paragraph. If initially it's too much for them to copy three or four sentences, you can just have them copy a portion of their copywork, but just so that they get writing practice, typing every day. Another skill that will help kids become good writers is one that not necessarily comes after typing or cursive. It's one that I use right along with copywork all the way from the very beginning. In fact, I begin teaching narration when my kids first start talking. So even my little two-year-old, when they sit on my lap and I'm reading a story to them, you know, as soon as they start using words and talking, I'm asking them questions. After I read something, who is this? What did he say? And narration is another skill that just seems so simple. It almost seems too simple. You think, how can this really be effective? I think you believe in narration when you've seen the results of it. And I have. From over 12 years of homeschooling, I have seen the results of narration. Narration is simply telling something back to someone else. So hearing something, hearing a story or a thought, and then processing it and telling it back to someone else. This is actually a very difficult skill. If you don't believe that, I would ask you to just try it. I have done this myself. Take a paragraph from any book or maybe a page from any book, read through it carefully, and then put it down and hand it to another person and try to tell back to them what you've read. It takes a lot more thinking and processing than you would imagine. This is what kids are doing when they're narrating. They're having to take something in, understand it, and then be able to communicate it back to you. I teach my kids first to narrate to me orally, and then after a while, usually by around third or fourth grade, to write out a short narration. And when they're very young, I think you really need to break it up and do it in small segments. So for example, if I'm reading a short story, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, I might read just a third of it and have them tell that much back to me, and then read the second third and have them tell that much back to me. Because when they're very young, it's hard to hear a full long story and give it back to someone. But as they progress, they should be able to read longer and longer stories and then write a narration. How often should kids do narration? I think they should at least be orally narrating back to you at least once a day. But written narrations, I've required my kids to do about two, sometimes three narrations a week. This is a great time to discuss their writing. After they've written a narration, you can sit down and talk about some of the vocabulary words. You can talk about the way they form their sentences, if they're doing run-on sentences, if they're kind of repeating the same style of sentence over and over again, how they can make their writing better. So there's so much that can be covered through this skill of narration. And again, it's one they can do on their own. And it takes, it's a habit that takes little work, a lot of thinking, and it just produces great results. The next step that we use to teach our kids writing is we include some grammar lessons for them. For our grammar, we use Abeka language. And I know this is also kind of hotly debated in public circles. Are grammar skills important for kids to learn to write well? And some would argue that they are not. I love the way Abeka language is laid out. Kids learn capitalization, punctuation. When they learn the parts of speech, they are kind of understanding and seeing some method to some of the patterns they've already observed in copywork and narration. They're understanding that every sentence has a subject, an action, and sometimes an object. It helps them to understand things like which pronouns to use before a verb and after a verb. Grammar helps them to use the words, for example, like bring and take appropriately. When are those to be used? Grammar helps kind of refine some of those skills for them. And so our kids start language lessons through Abeka when they are in fourth grade. The last thing that we encourage our kids to do as part of their homeschool writing, we encourage them to keep notebooks. And these can be their own ideas. You can help give them ideas. But for them, this is a way to express their thoughts and the things that are important to them. And I have lots of ideas for notebooking in a post that I did on the blog. Kids can keep a bullet journal, a calendar, a verse. They can keep a diary. They can write letters back and forth to you. We have a little notebook, and I'll write a little note to one of my kids, put it in their dresser, then they'll write a note back to me. And it's just kind of a great way to remember things that have happened throughout the years in your life. Kids can keep nature notebooks by observing things that they see during different seasons of the year. A notebook is a portrait of the child. When they keep a written account of things that they value, it kind of gives you a little window into their life. So we encourage our kids to keep notebooks just for enjoyment, for pleasure. So these are the basic steps that I use to teach our kids to write. And I've seen great results, especially from copy work and narration. I highly encourage it. Not all kids are going to love writing. Not all kids are going to enjoy it. But it is a lifelong skill to learn to communicate well. If you have any deficiencies when you enter the working world, if you can communicate well, it will cover those, and it will help you to function in spite of some of your deficiencies. So not all kids are going to love to write, but some of them will, and some of them will take off. Some of my kids just absolutely love to write, and when I read some of the things they've written now, I am proud of them, and they're proud of themselves. So I hope this step-by-step guide to homeschool writing was simple and something that would be easy to implement in your home. I'd love to hear your feedback and what topics you would like to see and hear more about. If you like the content that you see on my channel, would you please like and subscribe. When you like a video, it shows YouTube that this is the kind of content that you want to see and you want to view more of, and they will show it to more people. Thanks for listening in. Have a great day.