Creating opportunities for children to publish their work can be incredibly rewarding. Published books for kids offer a tangible way for young writers to see their creativity and effort come to life. When students go beyond the final draft and produce a finished bound book, it instills a sense of pride and accomplishment that motivates…
Field trip notebooks are a fantastic way to sneak in some writing practice while creating a memorable keepsake for your kids. Here’s how you can turn your family trips into learning experiences that your children will cherish for years. Field Trip Memories (And Learning, Too!) After a family trip to Michigan, we came home with…
Living literature isn’t just for reading but also for teaching writing styles! Serious writing lessons don’t start in our homeschool until middle and high school, but believe it or not, I often use picture books to help me teach. Since picture books can be read in one sitting, they are perfect examples of good writing from…
Why would anyone use picture books to teach expository writing? Because picture books are written by master authors who can teach us clearly through their examples. Not to mention, it doesn’t take long to read through most picture books, so you can share examples and get right to the work of writing. What is expository…
If there’s one subject that seems to befuddle homeschoolers more than any other, it’s writing. I hear it during homeschool consultations and casually talking among homeschool friends. Plus, I see questions about it all over the internet. People are often surprised when I tell them I don’t formally teach writing until middle school. Really, I don’t. And here’s…
Voice. It’s in every good piece of writing, but it’s a tad elusive to define and teach. Using picture books to teach voice in writing can help, though, and that’s what you’ll learn here. Writing that connects with readers has a voice. Writing that makes you feel emotion has a voice. When it comes to…
In my last post about teaching narrative writing, I mentioned how the subject of writing tends to be a thorn in the side of many homeschoolers. It doesn’t have to be that way, though! In this little series of posts, I hope to encourage you that teaching writing styles to your middle and high school students…
Looking for a Night Zookeeper review? Look no further. You’ve found a thorough one here! One of my favorite benefits of blogging is that I get to communicate with so many different homeschooling parents from all around the world. Families of all shapes and sizes, veteran homeschoolers to those just beginning to consider it, all…
One of my goals in homeschooling creatively has always been to help kids love writing. Whether students believe it or not, writing is an essential skill that finds its way into real life quite often. Teaching writing with real-life methods is a great way to convince kids of its importance. Not to mention, anytime an…
One of the things I love so much about nature study is its ability to merge together so many other academic subject areas. Nature study and language arts, for example, go hand in hand together. Think about all the reading and writing that take place as nature journals are written, field guides read, or new…
Typing instruction has always been an important part of our homeschool. Not just for the sake of learning to type, but as an integral part of our language arts program. In today’s technology age, of course it makes perfect sense to introduce our children early and often to correct typing format before bad habits are…
It’s time for another post in my series about using picture books to teach writing to middle and high school students! Today’s topic is using picture books to teach text structure. What is text structure? It’s how the information written in a text is organized. Learning to identify text structure as a reader can significantly improve…