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It’s the height of the convention season, and I’m pretty much in a different state every weekend. Yesterday I helped to set up the Apologia booth for our own state convention in Harrisburgh, PA. The CHAP Fair (Christian Homeschool Association of Pennsylvania) is one of the largest in the country. I’d be willing to bet our convention is held in one of the most unusual venues in the country: the PA Farm Show Complex, which is affectionally known as the Cow Palace around here. Here’s an image to help you visualize the setting:

It’s amazing how a little bit of carpeting can transform the place (but breath deep and you’ll know you’re still in a very large barn.)

I had an interesting discussion with one of the organizers about the future of state conventions, especially considering the ease with which we can avail ourselves of information and support online. What do you think? Are homeschool conventions important? What are some of the reasons you attend?  Here’s my short list:

1. State conventions demonstrate the strength and growth of our movement and that’s important for our survival.

2. State conventions renew our commitment to homeschooling and build our faith for continuing on.

3. State conventions help those getting started or just considering homeschooling to get plugged in and get the information they need easily and quickly.

4. ???? (Continue the list here….)

Photo courtesy of ©iStockphoto.com/MiquelMunill

When you read a story or report by one of your kids, what are you looking for? Proper grammar? Correct spelling and punctuation?

What feedback really helps kids become confident writers?

While following the conventions of the English language for grammar, punctuation, spelling and capitalization has an important role to play in good writing (It’s trait number six). It shouldn’t be our most important concern.

The number one trait of good writing is ideas. When you read something your child has written, first respond to the quality of the ideas in the story or report. Are the topics discussed interesting, original, thought-provoking or insightful?

Your children are eager to gauge your reaction to what they have written. Make your first comments about the sections of the paper you find most interesting or thought-provoking. Focusing here will help kids learn ideas matter most.  Always respond to the content before you comment on anything else.

If the ideas are murky or trite, then encourage your child to spend some more time researching the topic or considering how to make the plot more inventive.

The second trait to focus on is organization. Ideas need to be presented in an order that makes sense to the reader. Is there a logical progression to the way ideas and details are revealed? Secondly, readers like to have their curiosity piqued. A logical progression can include an interesting fact or question at the beginning or a surprise ending. If organization appears to be missing or weak, show your child where you get confused.

The  third trait of good writing is word choice. Consider the vocabulary your child has used. Is it academic enough for a science report? Is it descriptive enough for a short story? Are certain words often repeated and ought to be replaced to keep readers interested? Is your child’s vocabulary growing and can you see this in his or her writing?

The fourth trait is sentence fluency or syntax. Syntax is the way a writer builds sentences. Good writing has a rhythm to it. This is created by varying the sentence length–some are short, some are long–or by varying the types of sentences used. For instance, some begin with an introductory phrase like this one.  Others are more complex and include several phrases and clauses strung together. The variety is pleasing to the ear and adds interest, which keeps the reader engaged. And keeping the reader reading is the number one objective any writer should have.

The fifth trait is voice. This may be the most difficult to understand, but if ideas are the foundation of good writing then voice is the capstone. Voice is the writer’s written personality. I tell my students to think of it this way: in the same way you can identify your mom’s voice calling from the kitchen or a friend’s voice on the phone, you can tell a writer’s voice by the ideas, organization, word choices and syntax she commonly uses. Kids will certainly try a number of different voices as they grow as writers, but eventually they will each settle into habits of writing that identify a piece as uniquely theirs. We should celebrate the distinctives of each child’s writing and emphasize its importance.

Aim Academy English classes are writing-intensive and focus on teaching students the six traits of good writing.

http://teachthemdiligently.net/blog/2013/05/8-reasons-kids-learn-best-at-home/

First, it is important. The process of composing our thoughts and crafting them into written language is a powerful brain-building technique. Many kids find writing difficult because there are so many choices to make: What is a good idea to write about? What words should I use? What order should I put my thoughts in? We can help them embrace this process by assuring them that making all these decisions is great exercise for our brains. The more they practice generating and ordering their ideas, the faster they will become at this decision-making process. More importantly, the practice of writing regularly is the key habit that produces good writers. And the future belongs to the eloquent. No matter what path they head down up ahead, they are going to have to use written language to open doors of opportunity and to complete their daily tasks on the job and at home. Look how often you or your spouse must write today! E-mails, Facebook posts, texts, letters of protest or appeal, proposals, job queries, journal entries. We communicate far more often with written language these days than face to face.

Here are 10 tips for getting kids interested in writing:

1. Set aside a regular time to write. Stick to it. Slowly, even the most reluctant, will start producing ideas to put to paper.

2. Let them choose what to write about.

3. If they are stumped, give them two or three suggestions but let them choose.

4. Find new experiences to prime the pump. “Hey kids, why not jot down what you noticed about some of the animals you watched during our field trip to the dairy farm this week.”

5. Don’t emphasize spelling and grammatical correctness. Save that for only a few drafts you polish to perfection. Make their ideas what you talk about most.

6. Give them an audience for their writing. It can be sharing in a regular writers group or around the family dinner table once a week.

7. You write too and share your compositions as well.

8. Give them cool writing gear or an online portfolio: A special pen, a unique journal, a personal blog or Facebook page they can share with family and friends.

9. Encourage them to illustrate their stories and reports.

10. Find opportunities for them to connect with favorite authors — most have websites where they interact with readers. Watch for author visits in your area to libraries, schools or book stores.

What ideas can you add to the list?

…a prolonged season of carefree, open-ended learning when children are young lays a  foundation for diligent and directed studies during high school.

During high school the school days of our four teens consisted of challenging courses such as pre-calculus, French III, molecular biology, and Advanced Placement history. For the most part, they cracked the books from early in the morning until sometimes late at night. The evidence of their efforts was scattered about in almost every room of our house: college-level texts highlighted extensively, notebooks scrawled with study notes and complex math problems, graphing calculators and protractors, drafts of analytical essays-in-progress, and stacks of video lectures.

How did they stay motivated and focused (for the most part) and not buckle under pressure or revolt? Let me roll back the clock for you. Here’s what the early elementary days looked like at our house:

Leisurely mornings, frequent field trips to nature parks, museums, and science centers…long afternoons curled up in a favorite chair with a book, uninterrupted time for puppet shows, imaginative play and art project…lots of trips to the library, lots of time for thinking, lots of time outdoors.

In short, I’m convinced the prolonged season of carefree, open-ended learning when our children were young laid the foundation for diligent and directed studies during high school. Why? Because they weren’t burnt out by years and years of formalized, structured learning already. When it came time to confine much of the day to seatwork, to evaluate learning with tests and grades, to plow through rigorous and foreign matters; we were ready for the challenge. It was something new, something different, a signal of new responsibility and maturity on our part. It was time to apply ourselves in a disciplined, focused way because this was going to count towards our future.

Further, I believe that a less formalized approach to the elementary years was a critical preparation for this future learning. Here’s why:

Kids who bring broad background knowledge to a challenging subject such as biology have a much easier time processing and categorizing new information. The child who has spent hours exploring the stream that runs through the woods and has seen the mayflies, speckled trout, and tadpoles turning into frogs; or has noted the variations in leaves scattered about the ground and tracks of various animals fresh in the mud early each morning has a treasure trove of  firsthand knowledge to draw upon. When you show this kid the complex system of taxonomy field biologists have developed for categorizing living things, she isn’t thrown for a loop by all these Latinate names: she’s been categorizing living things unconsciously for years. She knows the distinguishing characteristics of many plants, animals and insects. She’s caught and collected a lot of them. The only thing she has to master in this scenario is the difficult names. Whereas, the child who has only had days filled with reading about them in his elementary science textbook is trying to memorize the scientific name of something he’s never seen, let alone handled. He doesn’t have the framework in place to do it.

Have you seen this phenomenon at work in your home? What areas have your children taken to like a duck to water? What role do leisure and exploration play in their education?

It’s Dr. Deb Fridays…a weekly blog post about a pertinent question. I’ll weigh in with my thoughts but we’re looking to leverage the wisdom of the crowd on these pressing issues.

My husband and I have always been early risers. Must be in the genes–his parents were both raised on a farm and maintained a lifelong habit of getting up before the crack of dawn. My parents, as teachers, likewise were always up quite early, talking loudly in the kitchen. During my homeschooling years, I liked to get things moving by 7 AM and stopped serving breakfast by 8. That changed as each of my kids entered early adolescence. They started sleeping later and later, and I often had to make several rounds before they were out of bed.

School started dragging on the other end, too. I liked to be done by at least 3 PM so I could get dinner (that rare occasion in my house) or laundry going. But my teens liked to do school at night and they wanted my help even though I had that “OFF DUTY” sign around my neck. Because I had plenty of other fronts to maintain, I chose to let them set their schedules. It worked out for us just fine. My adult children are now all early risers, too.

Teenagers do need more sleep during the height of adolescence. Their bodies are changing and their brains are growing. The average, doctors say, is nine hours a night, similar to the needs of a two year old (who likewise are experiencing dramatic, accelerated growth).

What do you do at your house? Is there an absolute deadline for getting up and going to bed? What principles inform your thoughts in this area?

Have a pertinent question you’d like us to crowdsource for you? Private message me on Facebook or send us an e-mail at info@debrabell.com.

Here are the handouts for the sessions I conducted on Jan 19th for the Moms’ Day Out in Abingdon, MD. Enjoy.
Debra

Homeschooling From A Foundation of Grace

Homeschooling Teens

Developing motivation and interest

Just a quick reminder that Aim Academy has a line up of terrific English classes that start second semester. Our courses are all designed to make sure your students are college-ready by the end of high school. They are also aligned with CLEP and AP exams, so students who take Aim courses are gradually preparing for these exams during their later high school years. We teach the content and skills measured on these exams embedded in high-interest courses with plenty of teacher interaction and feedback.

You can find the list of courses here.

We have two popular foundational courses for 6th-8th graders I’d like to ask you to seriously consider. Beginning with a few online classes in middle school is a great way to help students start to develop the study skills and academic background they need for college-ready coursework during high school. Our two middle school teachers, Joanna Breault and Lauren Bailes, are very experienced in working with this age group, and they provide a lot of personal feedback in both of their courses:

Together these two courses are designed to prepare students for our Introduction to Academic Writing and Literature in 9th grade.

Middle School Tools for English Excellence- a writing course for 6th-8th graders that lays a foundation for academic writing in high school. Assignments include descriptive, narrative, expository and persuasive essays. Young writers also learn to write “hooks” that create interest for readers and work on varying their sentence structure. Joanna also provided targeted feedback highlighting the student’s strengths and ways to take a student’s writing to the next level. Joanna has been a professional writer and writing coach to homeschooled students for many years. Register for Joanna’s second semester course here.

Middle School Tools-Reading Comprehension- students will read high interest literature and non-fiction while learning to read for inference and comprehension. As I recently explained to my own AP students, critical reading is not a skill you can develop overnight. Students who score high on the SAT verbal section or the multiple-choice questions on any AP exam have been reading broadly and analytically for many years. They have a rich vocabulary and they know how to read for inference. To really reap the benefits by the end of high school, students need to start in middle school practicing this skill consistently.  Lauren Bailes is a gifted teacher on loan to us while she completes her Ph.D. — take advantage of her experience and love for teaching while we have her! Sign up for Lauren’s class here.

Classes run for 15 weeks and start January 7th.