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Grading Essays Made Easy |Homeschool Life | Literature | Miscellaneous
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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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Composition: Let’s Make it Easier
You’ve just read the title of this post and are laughing uncontrollably. I get it. Writing is hard. My students confirm this, and so do yours.
Many moms report that their students have ideas in their heads but can’t get them on paper. Let’s start fixing that today.
What creates this strange head-to-hand disconnect? One major reason is that students don’t organize their thoughts or plan their papers. Big mistake. They think it’s a time waster; but you know otherwise.
The following is a short activity on opinion writing, devised for success. Practice these four steps to writing with your students. They won’t actually be writing this essay, which is one of the reasons this activity works so well.
(more…)New Tutorials to Document Sources
Okay. I’ll admit it. I abhor the nit-picky rules about citing sources and making a works-cited page. The rules are tedious. They’re boring. And they’re nerve wracking.
So, if it is hard for adults (which I like to think I am), what must our children and teens think of it? After all, writing a report is hard enough without all the “extra” stuff about citing sources.
On top of that, the rules change! About a year after The Power in Your Hands was published, with its lessons on citing sources and documenting a report, the Modern Language Association changed their rules.
What is a student to do?
(more…)Fun with Outlines. No, Really.
Could your students use a little help creating outlines? And what does a bowl of salad have to do with outlines?
My husband tells me he always made his outlines after he’d seen what he had written. I imagine this is fairly common.
But is an outline necessary? Not exactly. You can read about my sticky-note method here.
What is important, though, is organizing the material, and that is where students have trouble. They do not want to take the time to organize their thoughts, ideas, or material before they write.
Personally, I benefit from even a casual outline. That way, I don’t have to start with the introduction and work my way down to the conclusion; I have the pleasure of beginning wherever I like, where I feel the most comfortable. Then I can fill in the rest of my article later by using the organized points in my informal outline.
Whether your students use sticky notes or a more formal outline, they’ll benefit from these familiar outline ideas. (more…)
How I Saved My Own Writing Class
SHARON’S BLOG
“I can’t think of anything to write about.”
“This writing assignment is boring.”
Sound familiar? It did around my house as well. My three children and I hit the wall and almost gave up on writing because it became so tough on all of us.
But I saw value in my children learning how to write, so I worked hard to figure out how we could have a successful writing class. Here are the solutions I came up with—and they really worked! (more…)
