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Grading Essays Made Easy |Homeschool Life | Literature | Miscellaneous
Proofreading Tips | Writing Prompts
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Want homeschool writing tips? Encouragement? Help grading those essays? Practical advice for your homeschool writing class? Insights into literature? Free writing prompts and tutorials?
Whether your student is reluctant or brimming with excitement, you’ll find solid, proven ideas here that will make your teaching life easier. And take advantage of the many writing prompts and tutorials posted here.
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Be sure and browse the weekly writing prompts for middle schoolers and high schoolers.
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Choose Your Own Team
Soccer. The FIFA World Cup. It’s a major worldwide sporting event that draws huge audiences and viewers.
You can learn more about it here.
Is this prompt about soccer? (more…)
Proofreading: Three Methods to Make it Easier
Proofreading is never easy. Anyone who says it’s easy is trying to sell you something or has never actually tried it.
If we can’t make it easy, at least we can make it easier for our troubled, weeping students. In fact, with these three tips, you can change it from a job that requires the strength of a backhoe to one that uses a garden trowel.
Many professional writers use the first two methods in their own writing, and so can your students. The third one is exclusively for students.
The Talking Shoes
When was the last time your shoes talked to you?
Anthropomorphism is a word for “in the form of a human.” It’s close to the term personification, and if you mix them up, it’s okay by me.
Anthropomorphism means giving human attributes to something that is not human. For instance, the Toy Story movies use anthropomorphism to give life to the toys, as do all the Transformer movies and any other movies or stories in which animals or objects talk, laugh, plan, and do other things humans do.
An example of someone’s shoes taking on the human characteristic of speech occurs in Alexander McCall Smith’s Blue Shoes and Happiness. This passage comes just after the character believes she has made a terrible mistake with her fiancé and might have lost him: (more…)
Create Your Own Guide to Popularity
When Cress Delahanty wants to be elected freshman editor of her yearbook, she makes a list of traits needed to win the election.
Her mother asks her, “Traits like honesty, kindness, cheerfulness?”
Cress replies, “Nobody at school I ever heard of was popular for honesty.”
So she develops a plan: become known for something quirky. In “Trademark” by Jessamyn West, from Cress Delahanty, Cress decides to 
develop her trademark by doing strange things like wearing her slippers to the bus and leaving her sneakers in public places to be found.
But her plan backfires. (more…)
