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.
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.
I never thought I’d self-publish a book. Of course, having a blog is like self-publishing your own magazine, so it’s not like I have a general problem with the idea. But as someone who once owned a small publishing company, I liked the idea that there was someone else vetting my work, helping me make it better, then putting their stamp of approval on it.
Then along came Hanna.
My daughter (who is not named Hanna!) went through a phase where all she wanted to read were chapter book series. Judy Moody, Ivy & Bean, Ramona the Pest, junie b. jones, and even Captain Underpants were her favorites…and were all about school. One day she stood in front of the chapter book section at our library and asked mournfully, “Are there any books about homeschoolers?”
We looked for them, and there were a few. I keep a list of books about homeschoolers here. But there was nothing like the trials and tribulations of a young child at her studies—nothing like the books my daughter was obsessed with.
Back then, I homeschooled during the day and as soon as dinner was over, handed the household reins to my husband so I could go upstairs and work. That night, I went upstairs and invented Hanna, a young homeschooler who sits at the window seat in her grandmother’s house and watches her young neighbors leaving for the first day of school.
What I hoped to put into the book was the experience of homeschooling the way that other chapter book writers attempted to catch the joys and confusions of school. From what I have observed, most schools are more similar than different, whereas each homeschool is unique unto itself. I could no more contain the full homeschooling experience in a book than I could catch the unique details of each child in the world.
So Hanna, Homeschooler of necessity reflects my own experiences: a homeschool run by a mom who was ambivalent about the choice at first, an eclectic mix of structure and unschooling, a secular approach that includes education about religion, a dad whose job keeps him from being the primary educator but isn’t checked out from the daily lives of the kids.
I also added some fictional complications: My children’s own paternal grandmother never lived with us but in the story she is reimagined as the somewhat curmudgeonly denizen of the lion’s den downstairs. The father in the story is trying to better his family’s life and in so doing, has become less present in his daughter’s life. They have moved from the hippie mountain enclave that I imagined for them to a more conservative Central Valley town where they struggle to find like-minded families.
I wrote the book, got some feedback, and told my agent about it.
There’s this thing that agents do when faced with their client’s pet project that will never sell. “Well, certainly we could consider trying to find a home for the book, but let’s focus on the other manuscript first.”
In fact, my agent told me, she’d recently sold a book with a minor homeschooled character to a publisher. The publisher made it a condition of the sale that the author remove the homeschooled character from the story! “There’s no market for homeschooling stories,” they said.
Of course, I know the market for homeschoolers. You find it in households in every type of neighborhood. You find it amongst the upper crust and the barely getting by. You find it in libraries, in museums on free days, and anywhere they offer LARP. Homeschoolers are everywhere, yet largely invisible.
I agreed, however, that Hanna was hardly guaranteed to be a bestseller. I put her away, but she kept nagging at me. Why not just self-publish? she’d ask me. I don’t want to self-publish, I’d answer. Let someone else deal with it.
Finally, at a writing conference last spring, I attended a round table about self-publishing. As a former publisher, I had all the skills I needed save illustration. And all the other reasons I wasn’t self-publishing this book? Well, they didn’t seem to hold up when I tried to voice them.
“Go for it,” my fellow writers said.
“Well, I can’t think of why not,” I told myself. “So I guess I should just do this.”
I didn’t do this alone, of course. I got a number of adult and kid readers to help me with revising and making it a better story. I hired a professional illustrator I knew whose kids had attended school with my son. I am reaching out to my friends and colleagues to help me get the word out the way word usually travels in our circles, from homeschool to homeschool.
I hope those in the homeschool community enjoy my little tale. I could imagine some families with children in school might enjoy it, too. But mostly, I am pleased to be adding one more little voice to the ongoing story of our culture that writers create, each day as we tell our stories. Not every child goes to school. Hanna doesn’t, and though she wonders about school, she ends up happy and thriving in homeschool.
A while back I was contacted by the Aha Moment crew about taking part once they got to Santa Cruz. I had never heard of them, so of course my first instinct was that this was some new kind of phishing invented to fool Internet-savvy homeschooling moms. It turned out it wasn’t—it’s a real thing and a real job. This really nice group of young people travel the country in a trailer tricked out as a TV studio, interviewing locals at each stop and putting their interviews up on the Web.
I had two reactions to the idea of taking part:
1) I don’t really have “aha moments,” so it wouldn’t be authentic
2) Why would I bother?
After watching videos from the first location that popped up, I decided to watch videos from San Francisco. That’s what sold me. I realize that this is just another way for Mutual of Omaha to try to make us like them, but it’s insidiously wonderful in a weird little way. As soon as I switched to San Francisco—though the trailer, the lighting, and the editing were the same—it was a whole new experience. Those were San Franciscans I saw on the screen. It was so cool to see my former city of residence, the place that I always wanted to live until I lived there, and then always wanted to go back to when I could, represented in this funny little modern sociological experiment.
It felt cool. I decided to do it.
Then I had to find my “aha.” As I said, I don’t really think that way. But once I did, what I wanted to talk about became obvious.
I’m not saying you should go watch me, but I will say that this is a fun and curiously interesting portrait of America that those fuddy duddy insurance guys are bankrolling. I got very little time to chat with the crew, but I could see why they enjoyed their jobs so much.
Choose a city and watch! It’s lovely in a weird, millennial sort of way.
I wrote this essay a couple of years ago after attending a rather dispiriting writing workshop, which was led by agents who pretty much insisted that if you aren’t doing what everyone else is doing, you will never get published. Each of the rules below were ones I heard at this conference. I’m republishing it now inspired by this weekend’s SCBWI Golden Gate Conference, a lovely, supportive environment wholly at odds with that other one. This piece was originally published on the Write for Kids blog.
What do you do when J.K.Rowling does everything you’re not supposed to do?
I once heard a writer of adult literature read an essay she’d written about how Checkhov proved all truisms about what makes a well-written story wrong. But writers of children’s literature don’t have to go literary to get examples of their own. Here are five rules of writing I learned in children’s writers workshops, and what a quick rereading of the opening of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone says about such advice.
1) Kids’ books should never start with adults, a.k.a. “kill the mother.”
True, Harry doesn’t have a mother. But the first book immortalizing this character starts with the Dursleys, who aren’t even major characters. Their names are apparently Mr. and Mrs. Their son is “small”—definitely not a middle grade fiction reader. As we move forward with the confusing narrative, we meet elderly wizards sitting on a wall. This goes on for seventeen pages. The wizards talk about a baby. A giant arrives (OK, this sounds exciting, except he), bursts into tears, and needs to use an enormous hanky.
2) Kids’ books need to introduce the central tension immediately, without any confusion about “what this book is about.”
Yes, we do find out that Harry has been orphaned and he is going to live with “Muggles,” whatever they are. But we don’t get a whiff of the central tension of this book, or the series, anywhere near the first pages of this book. The Dursleys, who open the book, are always bit players, the tragi-comic relief of the series. You-Know-Who is mentioned but is apparently dead. And Harry himself, the boy who lived, literally sleeps through the scene. Judging from the opening, what the Harry Potter character “wants” is a good night’s sleep!
3) Kids’ books need to stick with a kid’s point of view.
Students, take note: Kids don’t want to read about what grown-ups are thinking and feeling. Never, ever write about a grown-up’s perspective or a grown-up’s concern. This line from Harry Potter must be a fluke: “It seemed that Professor McGonagall had reached the point she was most anxious to discuss, the real reason she had been waiting on a cold, hard wall all day…”.
4) Never start with generalized background descriptions of our characters.
I need only quote the second paragraph of Harry Potter: “Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.”
I could stop there (it’s pretty self-evident), but I must channel now the voices of JK Rowling’s writers’ group, who all learned what children like when they took writing classes as adults. “Now, Jo, you’ve got to cut all that Dursley nonsense. All those details can come up when they’re necessary. No kid is going to get past that first page with an expository paragraph like that!”
5) Children get impatient with long descriptions—keep it to a few words.
I can’t do better than Rowling, who stakes her £560 million on the belief that children do love a delicious description: “Nothing like this man had ever been seen on Privet Drive. He was tall, thin, and very old, judging by the silver of his hair and beard, which were both long enough to tuck into his belt. He was wearing long robes, a purple cloak that swept the ground, and high-heeled, buckled boots. His blue eyes were light, bright, and sparkling behind half-moon spectacles and his nose was very long and crooked as though it had been broken at least twice. This man’s name was Albus Dumbledore.”
So what does it tell us that the biggest selling children’s series in history breaks every one of the “unbreakable” rules offered in children’s writing workshops? I think it tells us a few things:
First, it tells us that great writing makes its own rules. I’m sure that if Rowling had followed all of the above advice, one of the twelve big publishing houses that rejected the book would have published it. And I’m equally sure that there would now be no Harry Potter mania of the sort we’ve seen. It would have been a fine book, as dismissible as the other fine but dismissible books that publishers feel safe publishing.
Second, it tells us that writers who want to rise above the din need to stay true to themselves. If the story that speaks to you is about wizards, it just can’t matter that the publishing industry says (as they did before HP) that kids are over wizards and are looking for dystopian romance or some such. A fine writer can crank out fine books that sell well by catering to the market. A writer who wants to do more must follow her muse, which may be whispering a long paragraph full of flowery adjectives in her ear.
Finally, the success of Harry Potter tells us that the publishing industry is too quick to elevate practical advice to received wisdom. Every piece of advice quoted above is good advice in many cases, but that doesn’t mean that it’s law. Of course, good writers work on their craft, and they try out advice to see if it improves their writing. But good writers, unlike mediocre writers, are not beholden to the rules.
As Harry Potter himself might say, when what you know to be true is at stake, there’s no point in following rules just to stay safe.
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.
