One of the hardest things for homeschoolers to work on is writing. We all carry baggage from our own education that colors how we see the writing process. There’s always that nagging voice that says that if we don’t subject our kids to something similar, we will fail to teach our kids to write well.
I have homeschooled two kids, one of them a natural writer, the other reluctant. I also teach kids writing at Athena’s Advanced Academy, and my students come in all flavors. Starting with my own kids, and now even more with my online students, I have rejected the traditional approach to teaching writing. In this post, I will discuss writing strategies for younger (pre-teen) children.
The tradition: Focus on shortcomings, follow rules
Traditional writing instruction teaches that writing follows rules, and that the teacher’s job is to show students where their writing fails. Students are forced to write:
for no purpose
non-creatively
about subjects they have no interest in
without an audience
Then teachers look at the product, point out what’s wrong, and tell the students to do it again. The result is bad writing, and kids who hate writing so much they will only produce it under duress.
The new approach: Follow passions, focus on the positive
When I started homeschooling, I took cues from homeschoolers and from special education teachers. Homeschoolers said that integrating learning into life made for deeper, more meaningful work. Special education teachers, faced with kids who have such severe shortcomings, have to focus on their students’ abilities, whatever they are.
My approach to teaching writing is an about-face from the traditional. My students write:
with a clear purpose
creatively
only about their interests
for an audience of fellow students or a general audience on the web
I am there to guide and nurture them, but instead of focusing on their shortcomings, I encourage what’s good about their writing.
Why focus on the positive?
Everyone who has ever had their writing critiqued in a traditional way carries psychological scar tissue that colors their writing. Writing, though necessary in business and academics, is an art. It comes from someplace more personal than the answer to a long division problem or remembering the cause of World War I. To be told that one’s writing is “wrong” is painful and results in negative feelings about writing.
When critiques focus on the positive, students are encouraged to do more of whatever is good in their writing. They are energized by success to find more success.
What if there is no positive?
Sometimes it’s very, very hard to find something good to say about student writing. But it’s worth delving as deep as possible to find encouragement. One student of mine was a very reluctant, poor writer. I had to struggle to find something good to say, but I pointed out that some sentences made me want to know more about what was happening. He responded by developing those sentences into full paragraphs. His writing blossomed. Within a month he was producing writing levels above his original pieces, and I could help him continue to improve by finding new positive points to encourage.
How will students fix the problems if we don’t point them out?
This is where it’s hard for me to shed the baggage of my own education. I had learned that no one will learn how to write a good paragraph unless we point out that they write bad ones. However, the reverse is actually true. In order to encourage positive development, I point out the very best a writer has produced (even when it’s quite poor). The writer works from her own level to build on her own successes.
I don’t completely ignore lessons in grammar, spelling, and writing structure. But in my classes, I separate these issues from the writing itself. It’s much more fun for students to savage a pretend piece of bad writing generated by me than their own work, which comes from their own souls.
One of the top concerns I hear about homeschooling from potential homeschoolers is employment. The parent destined to be the primary homeschooler (usually the mom but more and more often the dad) is concerned about whether they will be able to continue working.
I wrote my first book while in the thick of homeschooling two kids.
The concern is an important one, and not just for the obvious reason. Yes, the loss of income can be difficult for homeschooling families. Sometimes there is already an unemployed or under-employed parent whose time will be better-used in homeschooling, but often families take a financial hit when they decide to homeschool.
But beyond the question of money is also the question of the primary homeschooler’s self-image and personal fulfillment. Working is often as much about personal goals as it is about finances. If you have built a career, leaving it behind can be personally damaging. Focusing on your children to the detriment of your feelings of fulfillment and self-worth does not lead to successful parenting, much less to successful homeschooling.
Luckily, homeschooling and career are not mutually exclusive. Lots of homeschooling parents work and homeschool successfully, though it always requires a certain amount of flexibility and compromise.
In my own case, I started with the benefit that my work had always been done from home on a flexible schedule. Before children, I worked as a freelance writer, graphic designer, online marketing consultant, and small publisher. Once I had children, and then once I started homeschooling, I found that I needed to make adjustments.
But although I started from a flexible work situation, the main reasons I succeeded in continuing my work were the help of friends and family.
I started a homeschool co-op with other moms and brought my computer to classes and meetings so I could work on the go.
There is no way I could have continued working without the support of my husband. We had agreed when the children were babies that he would be the primary parent in the evenings so that I could get work done, and once we started homeschooling we expanded our arrangement. After dinner I would go into my office and it would be “work time” for me. During this time I was able to write a book about homeschooling, a chapter book, and numerous articles.
The other major thing I did was to set up a variety of homeschooling support systems:
Kid exchange:
I found friends who had children in a similar age range and who had similar needs. This wasn’t as hard as it sounds! We each would devise something we would do with our little pack of girls to give the others a morning off. For example, I live next to a redwood forest, so I led forest hikes and taught nature studies. Another mom was an excellent seamstress and taught sewing.
Paid care:
I paid money to a babysitter when necessary. I didn’t really have to do this much after my daughter was about six, but it was an option I used.
Public resources:
I registered both children in a public school homeschool program that offered a drop-off class day each week. You might not have this option in your area, but sometimes private schools offer this as an option, too. This program also led field trips, so the parents who lived near each other would sometimes offer to take each other’s kids on the field trips to give time to the other parents.
Cooperative homeschooling:
I started a homeschool coop with other homeschoolers. We all taught classes there. Part of my job was to get wi-fi set up so that I could bring my computer and work while my kids were playing or in classes with other children.
Those were very, very busy years. That said, I worked a fair amount. I remember one day at my daughter’s gymnastics class I was worked very hard on a magazine article, sitting in the parent area with my computer.
At the end of class I looked up, and the mom next to me said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so focused on their work before!” It was a skill that I had to develop once I realized that I’d get very little quiet, focused time at home with no kids. But it worked out. As the kids have gotten older, of course, they have needed me less. Now I can put in something like a 2/3 workday, and actually spend evenings with my family!
Below you will find the first chapter of my chapter book, Hanna, Homeschooler. I hope you enjoy it! Please feel free to leave comments below. You can purchase Hanna in e-book or paperback at Amazon.com and BN.com.
*
Hanna sat in the window seat looking out at the grey morning. It was seven-thirty, and usually she wouldn’t be dressed yet. But she dressed for this morning.
The two girls across the street, first Kira and then Cassie, came out of their houses. They were right on time.
Kira and Cassie were going to the first day of school. Hanna wasn’t. She sat in the window seat, thinking about that.
Hanna had only moved into this house during the summer. A few months before, her dad had lost his job. Mom said Gram needed help with the big house now that Gramp was gone. So they moved from their cabin in the Sierra mountains to Central California, where Mom had grown up.
It was flat, and hot, and there were so many houses. They had left behind Hanna’s friend, Henry, and all the trees that Hanna knew like people.
Hanna sits in the window seat watching her neighbors go to the first day of school.
Hanna’s dad had been leaving home early to go to school. He was training to be a nurse, which Kira said was weird. Mom explained that being a nurse was a good job, but in the past, only women did it.
But Dad was doing it because he wanted to help people. Hanna didn’t think that was weird.
Kira and Cassie were different than any kids Hanna had known. Hanna wondered if they thought she was weird, too.
Kira and Cassie’s moms backed their cars into the street and were gone.
“What are you doing up so early, pumpkin?” Mom asked Hanna, coming up behind and kissing her head.
Hanna squirmed away.
“Uh-oh, the rare spiny pumpkin has come to our house again!” Mom said. “What do you see happening out there on those manicured lawns?”
“Kira and Cassie went to school,” Hanna said. “I wonder what they are going to do for the first day. What are we going to do today?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mom said, stroking Hanna’s hair. “I’d like to do some baking.”
Hanna sighed. That didn’t sound like much of a plan.
Hanna’s mom was very busy with the baby, David, who was really not a baby anymore. He was born early and spent months inside an incubator getting big enough to come home, so Mom said he’d be like a baby a little longer than other kids.
David was almost two and he crawled almost as fast as Hanna could walk. Hanna’s mom said Gram’s house was a babyproofing nightmare. Gram fought with Mom about moving her knickknacks up out of the kids’ reach. Gram said her house was looking all disarranged.
When she thought Hanna wasn’t listening, Mom told Dad the house was like a dusty tschatschke shop. That word was pronounced “chach-kah.” That was Mom’s word for all Gram’s stuff. Gram didn’t like to get rid of anything.
Hanna liked Gram’s stuff—each thing had a story. And she liked the window seat where she could sit and see so much action.
Mom went off to dress David and Hanna wandered into Gram’s room.
Gram used to sleep in the big master bedroom upstairs where Mom and Dad were sleeping now, but she wasn’t so good with stairs now. Her room was back behind the living room and had wine-colored wallpaper with a flower pattern. Gram called it the “den,” which made Hanna think it used to be inhabited by lions. But Mom told her it used to be the TV room.
Gram had a TV in there, and it was always on, playing the weather.
“Hi Gram,” Hanna said from the doorway. Her parents had told her not to go in unless she was invited.
“Hannietta,” Gram said. She was sitting at her vanity so her reflection looked at Hanna. “Come in.”
Hanna sniffed as she entered the room. The whole house smelled like Gram, but it was strongest in this room. Dust, roses, and furniture polish.
Gram turned. She had a little object in her hand, which shook like she was cold. Hanna knew that Gram used to make beautiful things like the quilt on Hanna’s bed. Now her hands wouldn’t let her sew or knit anymore.
“You can help me with this, dear,” she said.
Hanna stood over her and looked down at the yellowed book on Gram’s vanity. It had pictures stuck on with little black corners, which was what Gram had in her hand. Hanna noticed that one corner was missing from around a photo of a smiling man in a uniform.
“It’s so hard for me to place these, now,” Gram said, letting Hanna take the corner from her hand. “Can you lick it and stick it on that corner?”
Hanna licked the back of the little corner and eased it onto the photo. She and Gram pressed down their fingers one on top of the other to stick it down.
“That’s Gramps,” she said to Hanna.
“Gramps?” Hanna was surprised. He was young and thin and had a full head of hair. The Gramps Hanna remembered was old and thin and quiet.
“Haven’t you seen my photos yet?” Gram answered. “Oh, I have so many. From when I was a child, when your grandfather and I married, when your mother was young.”
Gram pointed to the handsome young Gramps and a group shot of young men in uniform. “This was when Gramps went to war. Did you know he was a fighter pilot?”
Hanna shook her head.
“Oh, yes, he was a hero!” Gram exclaimed. “He went overseas and shot down enemy planes. Then his plane was shot down and we didn’t hear from him for two years.”
Gram’s face softened into that faraway look she got.
“His family and my family lived across the street from each other in Brooklyn, you know. In New York. We knew each other before we knew each other!”
Gram bubbled with laughter.
“We always knew each other’s business because from our living room you could see right into his. I remember the day the telegram came saying he was missing in action—the army didn’t know where he was, but they thought the Germans had probably caught him. That day I saw the telegraph boy go up the steps of his house and I ran across the street and was there before they’d even had a chance to read it. I can still hear his father reading that telegram, and his mother trying not to cry, and his little sister—that’s Aunt Molly—saying, What does it mean? What does it mean?”
Hanna considered this story.
“So Aunt Molly was a little girl?” she asked doubtfully. Aunt Molly had always seemed even older and stricter than Gram.
Gram bubbled with laughter again. “Why, yes, dear, she was nearly ten years younger than George. Haven’t you ever seen our family tree?”
“What’s a family tree?” Hanna asked.
“Let’s draw one!” a voice said cheerfully from the door. It was Mom, who’d been watching with David balanced on her hip. “Come on!”
Gram and Hanna followed Mom out of Gram’s bedroom.
Mom opened the cabinet in the dining room which she’d emptied of Gram’s stuff so she could keep homeschooling supplies.She drew out an enormous roll of white butcher paper, placed David on the floor, and rolled it out. She fixed the paper at each end of the long dining room table with tape and then ripped off the roll.
Meanwhile, Gram had figured out what Mom was up to. She’d taken out Hanna’s bucket of markers. She wrote Rosa Weinstein in red at the top of the butcher paper and circled it. Next to that, she wrote Schmuel Schimmelfarb in blue. Gram’s letters were shaky like the scary letters on Halloween posters.
“Can you help me, Hannietta?” Gram asked. “Under Rosa, write 1884, and under Schmuel, write 1878.”
*
Hanna was surprised when lunchtime came. She and Gram had munched on apples and muffins while the family tree spread and grew down the paper so they had to connect some of the people with snaking long lines.
When she looked at it, Hanna did think it looked like a tree, with long, long roots. Gram could remember all the names and almost all the birthdates without looking at her book, but after they were done she got out her book and showed Hanna pictures of all these people who were related to Hanna. There were so many! And they came from countries in the world that didn’t even exist anymore.
After lunch, Mom printed out a map of Europe and Hanna outlined and shaded in where Austria-Hungary was when Rosa and Schmuel had left and come to America by ship. The ship only had sails and no motor! Then Hanna went outside to swing and climb the tree, while Mom and Gram helped David learn how to use the baby slide.
“Are you really so set on keeping her out of school?” Hanna heard Gram ask. “Do you really think she’ll learn what she needs to?”
Sometimes Gram and Mom talked grown-up talk that made Hanna feel like she was just a name on the family tree.
*
Later, when she was sure they were home, Hanna got permission to go across the street to see Kira and Cassie. She found them talking at Cassie’s swingset, looking serious and proud.
“My teacher’s name is Mrs. Conger,” Cassie said. “We made our handprints with finger paint and traced our names under them to put on the wall.”
Cassie, Hanna knew, was in kindergarten. She didn’t know how to read yet, but she was big and strong and Hanna liked her funny laugh.
“My teacher’s name is Mr. Greg,” Kira said. “My mom was afraid I wouldn’t like a boy teacher, but he’s so nice. And in first grade, we don’t have to take naps like kinders.”
“What did you do in school today?” Kira asked Hanna.
Hanna felt their curious eyes on her as she felt her face get hot.
We’re in the thick of homeschooling high school, with a junior getting serious about looking at college and next year’s freshman thinking she might go back to homeschooling. Thinking about homeschooling my younger child again sparked me to think about what we’ve done that’s successful, and what we might change.
Goal-setting helps kids understand that their education is for them, not for their parents!
Amidst the complexity of homeschooling high school, one success does stand out. I think it was at a homeschooling conference where I heard the advice that young teens need to be taught goal-setting. At that point, my son was largely unschooling, following his own interests. He was doing great at that, but I knew that once he entered the high school years and what he did started to “count,” homeschooling might get more complicated.
So I made a decision (in fact, I set a goal!): Once a week we sat down together and went through a goal setting curriculum I’d found online. [Goal Setting for Students, in case you’re interested.]
The curriculum was not a great fit for homeschoolers. It was very school-focused, of course, and every time they used sports as an example in the text, my sports-averse son would swear it was the stupidest thing he’d ever done.
Focusing on goal setting at that age, however, turned out to be an incredibly important step in preparing my son for homeschooling high school.
Lesson #1: We set and meet goals all the time
This was the first thing my son and I took away from formal goal setting studies. It’s the most basic part of goal-setting, yet I realized personally that I had never been taught to do this in a formal way.
For my son, it was an introduction to meaningful reflection—the process of thinking about your thinking. [I wrote on this topic on my KidsLearn blog here.] This is not something that most teens do instinctively, so at first it’s a bit like being a kid walking in his dad’s shoes.
Lesson #2: Goals allow us to focus our actions and prioritize
If you never think formally about your goals, you can find yourself spending a lot of time spinning your wheels. The decisions we make on a daily basis reflect whether or not we are focused on our goals. Homeschooling high school offers many more choices than school does, so having specific goals allows students to make decisions about which direction to go.
Lesson #3: Big goals can be broken down into a series of steps
Big goals, which are often quite distant from a teen’s everyday life, can seem too complex. But when broken down into steps, big goals become more manageable. The path you have to take can also appear more flexible once you start seeing that each step can be modified according to current needs and desires.
Applying goal setting to homeschooling high school
Once we had the concept of goal setting down, we had the foundation to do the work that is now paying its dividends. We went over all the ways that our son could spend his high school years, and how each choice might apply to his eventual goal of making it to a good university.
Goal-setting needs to emphasize that there are many ways to get to any destination.
It became very clear to him that his choices would have a direct effect on whether he meets his goals. And more importantly, it became clear to him that they were his choices, not his parents’. Once he stated his goals, it would be up to him whether he met the challenges facing him or not.
When kids attend a high school, their success depends in part on how self-motivated they are. But successful high school homeschooling requires self-motivation. At the time in life when their biology is telling kids to rebel against their parents and strike out on their own, it’s nearly impossible for a parent to “force” a teen into anything.
Once a teen has set his or her own goals, however, there is no forcing involved. The essential vocabulary of our conversations about school work has changed.
In a non-goal-setting household, a parent might say, “You have to do this or you’ll get a bad grade.” The threat of punishment in the form of grades is how the parent attempts to force compliance.
In a goal-setting household, a parent can say, “So what grade do you need to get in this class in order to meet your goal?” In this case, the student’s behavior is turned back to his or her own stated goals.
In a non-goal-setting household: “If you don’t do the work you need to do, I’m going to make you go back to school.”
In a goal-setting household: “You chose to homeschool so this is the path you’re taking. If you feel that was the wrong choice, should you reconsider school as an option?”
The word choices are only slightly different, but they always turn the decision-making back to the student and his or her goals. Conversations that might have turned immediately emotional and adversarial become productive conversations about goals and priorities.
Nothing in parenting is easily resolved; teens are going to argue, they are going to change their minds, and they are going to make mistakes. But getting goal-setting vocabulary into your homeschool in the early teen years can help students become more successful when independence is what they crave.
I’ve always been big on walking. I probably learned it from my parents. We lived on a dirt road at the edge of town. At the end of a long, hot summer day we would saunter out of our house and down the road, dogs at our heels, a string of cats following further behind. I don’t remember that much was said on these walks. We’d greet neighbors occasionally, or perhaps remark on the color of the sunset.
Later, I became a runner, and I ran religiously—perhaps compulsively—until various joints gave out in my thirties and I had to slow to a walk again.
We are only part of the way through Oakley’s book, but it’s turning out to be a good choice for a family read-aloud if you have teens who are starting to face difficult learning situations.
When my children were small, walking became a luxury. Neither child really enjoyed being in the stroller. As soon as they could walk, I had to slow down to toddler speed. For a while we had a golden age of swimming lessons—I could register them for lessons and pop off to the adult pool for a much-needed break. But for the most part I got little exercise.
My body rebelled. When the children were small, I remember scheduling an appointment with my doctor because I’d looked up my symptoms and found out I had leukemia.
“I’m happy to run blood tests,” my doctor said. “But I don’t think you have leukemia. I think you have children.”
I wish she had given me a simple prescription to cure what ailed me, but it took my back going out to get there. By the time my son was ten and my daughter was six, I was getting no walking time at all. I was in the most intense time of parenting a child with undiagnosed special needs. My husband was working over the hill,* coming home exhausted and irritable. I developed an excruciating pain in my hip.
(*That’s Santa Cruz-speak for working in Silicon Valley, which is a hair-raising mountain highway drive away from where we live.)
It turned out that the pain was being referred from a malformed spine, and there was only one treatment that worked to keep the pain at bay: walking.
I realized that the health of my family depended on my being able to get out on my own each morning, so my husband and I juggled schedules and made it happen. Soon after, he took the cue that we could juggle schedules again and find time for his bike riding. We both became healthier and happier people.
Research is showing from every which way that our bodies and minds need the repetitive back-and-forth of full-body exercise. Whether you walk, swim, bicycle, or (I’m suggesting this inspired by my daughter’s newest craze) pogo-stick, repetitive movement is a key part of mental and physical health.
Inspired by my inability to keep up with the Coursera course “Learning How to Learn,” I bought the book by Barbara Oakley that the course is based on. I figured I might not be able to keep up with the course, but if I put the book by our dinner table, I might get around to reading a bit out loud each evening.
Ah, the days when I not only had the time to run, but also intact tendons!
OK, I’m going to admit that we are a highly imperfect homeschooling family. Our reading has been—I’ll put this nicely—sporadic. However, during tonight’s reading I moved into familiar territory as she talked about how sometimes, what you need to do in order to solve a problem is step away from it. I remembered those warm Midwestern nights, the panting of the dogs, and the giggling of the kids as we’d see our cats strung out in the road behind us.
There are many things that we lost as we moved toward today’s goal-oriented, success-focused culture. One of the things we lost was our innate understanding of taking it easy. Walking (or swimming, bicycling, pogo-sticking, or whatever flavor of repetitive motion you prefer) is a gift from nature. It not only realigns a malformed back; it realigns our brains and helps us work through problems even when we don’t know we have them.
It’s easy to blame the Internet for many of our ills, but I know I’d never have found this information without it. I remember myself lying on the couch that summer when my kids were 10 and 6, wondering how I was ever going to survive the physical and mental anguish. I had no idea that a simple thing like walking was key to that solution, and much more.
The tradition: Focus on shortcomings, follow rules
When I started homeschooling, I took cues from homeschoolers and from special education teachers. Homeschoolers said that integrating learning into life made for deeper, more meaningful work. Special education teachers, faced with kids who have such severe shortcomings, have to focus on their students’ abilities, whatever they are.
This is where it’s hard for me to shed the baggage of my own education. I had learned that no one will learn how to write a good paragraph unless we point out that they write bad ones. However, the reverse is actually true. In order to encourage positive development, I point out the very best a writer has produced (even when it’s quite poor). The writer works from her own level to build on her own successes.
