Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

Honest. Quirky. Real. Practical tips, candid reviews, and stereotype-smashing humor for homeschooling families.

Honest. Quirky. Real. Practical tips, candid reviews, and stereotype-smashing humor for homeschooling families.

4 Ways to Be More Consistent with Writing Instruction

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Confession time: I find it easy to let writing instruction fall by the wayside in my homeschool. There. I said it. Writing is one of the most vital skills to teach a kid, and yet I have trouble teaching writing consistently.

Why is that? It’s because teaching writing isn’t easy. It takes time and one-on-one instruction. As much as I’d like to send my kids off to learn writing on their own, they need my help.

4 Ways to Be More Consistent with Writing Instruction

I’m not saying that my kids don’t write. They do. It’s just that the part where I impart knowledge to them on the subject sometimes isn’t as consistent as I’d like it to be.

Effective writing instruction includes modeling, editing, and publishing your student’s work. It involves providing feedback and identifying weak spots that need to be improved.

Younger students (and many older ones) need help brainstorming ideas and organizing their thoughts. They may even need you to help with the physical act of writing while they dictate their thoughts to you.

Teens need help applying their foundational writing skills to writing essays and research papers. Many still need assistance in breaking their assignments into daily goals and holding them accountable for meeting deadlines.

One of my goals for the upcoming year is to be more consistent with writing instruction – that thing where I purposefully work with my kids to improve their writing skills. What’s my plan?

Use Writing Prompts

Sometimes the hardest part of writing is coming up with ideas. That’s when writing prompts come in handy. I love to give my teens a few writing prompts from which to choose rather than assigning one. That way, they can pick the one that sparks their interest rather than trudging through a boring assignment.

The free monthly writing prompt downloads from WriteShop are fantastic! You can also sign up to get a daily writing prompt for teens or elementary grade students via email.

WriteShop

I’ve been surprised at some of the writing prompts my kids have chosen and the level of creativity that has resulted. I don’t use writing prompts every day, and they shouldn’t take the place of formal writing instruction, but they make a fantastic change of pace and provide an excellent source of consistent writing practice.

Try a Variety of Writing

Many kids have a preference for writing genre. Both of my girls prefer creative writing. They like to tell stories. My boy would much rather write a how-to paper.

I like giving my kids a say in what they write because they tend to enjoy the process more that way. However, I also want to make sure to include a variety of writing style practice in our homeschool. Kids need opportunities to write poetry, make lists, express an opinion, explain a process, describe something in vivid detail, write an essay, and complete a research paper.

Those creative writers need to be able to write expository papers, and my how-to guy has an impressive creative streak when he decides to tap into it.

Have a Plan

You know that saying, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”? Yeah, that’s true with writing instruction, too. Thankfully, we use WriteShop, and they make the planning part easy. The teacher’s guide has one-, two-, and three-year tracks all laid out for you in their lesson plans section. They even offer tips on choosing the right track for your family.

WriteShop I and II

What WriteShop doesn’t do is come to your house and teach writing for you. {ahem} Nope, that’s where your own planning and self-discipline come into play. (Hence, the main reason for writing this post. Apparently, my self-discipline is lacking.)

My plan for consistently teaching writing this year is two-fold. First, I’m going to put a reminder on my phone. It may sound crazy, but that’s about the only way I can keep myself organized. I love the Tick-Tick app. I have reminders for everything from checking the dogs’ water every four days to taking my meds each morning. Why not add “teach writing,” too?

Second, I’m going to invite WriteShop to come to my house and teach writing for me. Yes! After years of trying to find my own self-discipline, I’m going to try the WriteShop video courses! I’ll still have to do the editing and grading and such (though there are options for them to do that for you), but with the video courses, I should be able to send my teens off to do their writing lessons on their own.

And, lest you think that I’m unwilling to teach my kids, it’s not that. It’s just that we all have different preferred work times. That’s what makes working one-on-one so tricky. I’m hoping the video courses will allow my teens to do the majority of the lessons independently on their preferred schedules.

4 Ways to Be More Consistent with Writing Instruction

Give Writing a Purpose

It’s crucial that kids – no matter what age – see a point to writing. They don’t want to labor over brainstorming, writing a rough draft, editing, and rewriting a neat final draft just to have Mom slap a grade on their paper and move on. That seems like a pointless waste of time and effort.

It’s important that we publish our kids’ writing in some form or fashion. Some ideas for “publishing” include:

  • Sending the final draft to a friend or relative
  • Creating homemade books
  • Submitting the completed project to a magazine or website
  • Blogging
  • Displaying the paper on the fridge or bulletin board
  • Adding the final draft to your student’s portfolio
  • Creating a project such as a comic strip or play

Can you believe that I can’t sell my teens on the idea of blogging? What is wrong with them?! I have one who likes to produce videos, though, so that is one publishing option for her.

There’s no one right way to publish a student’s work. The chosen method just needs to be one that is fun for the writer and shows him that he’s not writing just for the sake of checking off a box on his assignment sheet.

What are your best tips for keeping a consistent writing schedule?

4 Sure-Fire Strategies to Help Struggling Readers

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Do you have a child who struggles with reading? It is such a maddening, helpless feeling to watch your child struggle and not know how to help. Suspecting that your child may have a learning disability magnifies that helpless feeling.

If you suspect that your child may have dyslexia, learn the warning signs, and develop a plan of action. Kids with dyslexia are not unintelligent; they just process information differently. While you can’t “cure” dyslexia, you and your child can learn how to deal with the processing differences it causes.

4 Sure-Fire Strategies to Help Struggling Readers

1. Get a diagnosis

The first step to helping your struggling reader is to determine if he does have dyslexia. Brianna has mom-diagnosed dyslexia. There is not a doubt in my mind that she is dyslexic. However, hers is mild enough that by educating myself and providing her with one-on-one attention, she learned to read and developed effective coping strategies.

Josh’s dyslexia is much more pronounced. The programs and techniques that worked with Brianna didn’t work with him. The turning point for us was getting a diagnosis. We used the free dyslexia screening offered by Lexercise. The screening indicated that Josh would benefit from a full evaluation.

(Because I know you’re wondering, no, it doesn’t flag every kid as needing the full assessment. Out of 10 bloggers and their children who tried the free screener as part of the review process, only two of us had children identified as potentially dyslexic.)

You may choose to seek an evaluator in your area. The earlier you seek treatment, the less your child has to struggle. I wish we had discovered Lexercise sooner. If you suspect your child may have dyslexia, I urge you to try the free screener. If nothing else, it may rule out the possibility and put your mind at ease.

2. Consider treatment options

We chose to complete the Lexercise dyslexia therapy, which was an answer to prayer for us. Because the cost of professional therapy proved prohibitive for many families, Lexercise now offers the option of basic therapy at a much lower rate. They also offer discounts for HSLDA members.

Although the initial cost of professional therapy may cause a bit of sticker shock, the investment was completely worth it. Josh completed the program in about five months, and some kids finish it in as little as three.

Lexercise Iceberg of Dyslexia

image used with permission from Lexercise, creator of a free online dyslexia test

There are, of course, other dyslexia treatment options, but Lexercise worked wonders for Josh, and I wholeheartedly recommend them. You may want to do some research on the Orton-Gillingham approach and the Barton method.

3. Educate yourself

Take the time to educate yourself. The more you learn about dyslexia, the more effectively you can help your child. I recommend:

I also highly recommend the site, Homeschooling with Dyslexia. Its author, Marianne Sunderland, is a 20+ year homeschooling veteran and mom of 8 kids, 7 of whom have dyslexia. Over the years, she has spent countless hours self-educating about dyslexia and is a certified Orton-Gillingham tutor.

Marianne has many resources, including Parent Dyslexia Classes, online courses to help you quickly and easily educate yourself about dyslexia and the most effective ways to help your dyslexic student.

These courses are for any parent of a dyslexic student regardless of whether your child is homeschooled or is attending public or private school.

help for kids with dyslexia

4. Find the best resources

Finally, it’s important to find the best resources for your student. Dyslexia affects much more than just reading and spelling. You may need to think outside the box for other subjects, such as math and foreign language.

Both of my dyslexic students benefited from Teaching Textbooks, a video-based math curriculum. We also love All About Spelling, which works well for all types of learners, but was developed with dyslexic kids in mind.

I only wish All About Reading had been around when my kids were younger. We’d have used it in a heartbeat. The reading instruction meshes seamlessly with the spelling program.

spelling programs for kids with dyslexia

Another fantastic resource is Learning Ally, a national non-profit organization that supplies audiobooks, read by volunteers, to people with visual and reading impairments. The books available include literature and textbooks (mostly titles used in public and private schools, but there are titles available from some of the more well-known homeschool publishers).

Many of their titles now include VOICEtext books, which highlights the words as they are read. That’s a fantastic help for kids with dyslexia who benefit from seeing and hearing the words.

4 Sure-Fire Strategies to Help Struggling Readers

Learning Ally does require a nominal yearly fee and a print disability diagnosis. (We used Josh’s diagnosis from Lexercise.)

We began using Learning Ally in 2014 and found it very helpful. Another option is checking out both the print book and the audiobook from the library, so your child can follow along visually as he listens.

These strategies proved extremely effective for my family of (formerly) struggling readers.

Have you had experience with a struggling reader? What tools or resources have you found particularly effective?

updated from an article originally published June 4, 2015

Don’t Make These Mistakes When Teaching Writing

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Teaching writing can be a stressful endeavor for many homeschooling parents. It’s a skill our kids will use throughout their lives, and many parents don’t consider themselves good writers. You can teach your child to write (a solid writing curriculum doesn’t hurt). Just make sure you aren’t making these mistakes when teaching writing.

1. Failing to utilize the “sloppy copy.”

When I first began to teach my kids to write, I didn’t teach them that the first draft is always their sloppy copy. That was a big mistake because they thought I was punishing them by making them rewrite a final copy or marking their errors in ink that they couldn’t erase.

Teach your kids that the purpose of the first run-through of any writing assignments is to get their thoughts on paper. They should write only on every other line so that there is room to make notes and corrections. They shouldn’t worry too much about spelling or punctuation because they’ll come back to edit the paper later. They may even want to write in pen so that they’re not tempted to erase and edit as they go.

2. Being overly critical.

We’re all familiar with the dreaded red pen. It shouldn’t look as though your pen met with a horrific end on your student’s paper. Choose one or two areas to correct and let the rest go until you’re ready to focus on those skills. If you’re teaching a young student, your primary concern may be starting sentences with a capital and ending with a period. Make those corrections and ignore the misspelled words or proper nouns that haven’t been capitalized.

I’ll let you in on another secret – some kids really hate that red pen. It’s okay to mark their mistakes in pencil (as long as they know they’ll still have to write a final draft).

3. Refusing to help.

It’s easy to worry that you’re giving your student too much help, but over the years I’ve learned that it’s important to work alongside them. They need a competent writer (that’s you!) to model good writing, give them examples, and provide a writing sample. I finally learned that lesson with my younger two. (Poor guinea pig first child.) Whenever we’d work on a new type of writing, I’d write my own paper as an example.

Also, don’t worry about writing your child’s words as he dictates them, especially with younger students. They often have plenty of ideas, but the physical act of getting the words on paper hinders their creativity. Help your student get his thoughts down; then he can work on editing and writing the final draft.

4. Stressing over the topic sentence.

The biggest mistake I used to make with my kids was giving them a good idea for a topic sentence and telling them they couldn’t use it. Yeah, I was nice, wasn’t I? It goes back to worrying that you’re offering too much help, but sometimes coming up with a topic sentence is the hardest part. Don’t be afraid to get your kids started with a strong topic sentence.

Also, don’t feel that you have to make them start with a topic sentence. Even as a blogger, I often have lots of ideas, but I’m not sure how to start off my post. I’ve found that I’m much more productive when I just start writing and come back to add the introduction later. If your kids have ideas but are struggling to start, tell them to leave some blank lines at the top of their paper and come back to the introduction after they get their thoughts down.

5. Withholding praise.

This probably goes along with not being overly critical, but be sure you’re not withholding praise for your child’s writing. If you’re a lover of words like me, it can be easy to see all the mistakes, so train yourself to look for the positive and lavish praise for that.

Did she remember to capitalize the first word in each sentence? Is the paper creative? Did he include strong verbs? Tell your student what he did well!

It’s easy to inadvertently create a reluctant writer if you aren’t careful. Make sure that you’re not making these critical mistakes.

What mistakes when teaching writing would you add to this list?

This post is linked to the Hip Homeschool Hop.

WriteShop

5 Easy Ways to Bring Books to Life

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Written by Susan Williams of Education Possible.

Books offer children a unique way to learn about the world around them. They can share details of events from the past, offer a glimpse into the future, and introduce fictional worlds that seem very real. Families can use books as a springboard for learning about history, geography, art, science, and more.

Discussions and hands-on activities help kids understand and process the information they read. We have discovered many ways to make books, and the information they contain, more interesting and relatable for our students.

5 Easy Ways to Bring Books to Life

Here are some of our favorite ways to bring books to life for children of all ages.

Make a Map

It is important to identify the setting of a story. The setting is where the story takes place. This may be a real place in the past or present, or an imaginary land. By creating a map, students can track activity throughout the story and understand the environment in which the action takes place. Basic maps can be drawn or made from simple materials like food or salt dough.

When we read Island of the Blue Dolphin our students used clay and cardboard to make a map of the island. During a reading of Around the World in 80 Days my children printed an outline world map and then marked the cities Fogg visited, noting the type of transportation used and the number of days it took to travel between each city.

Take a Field Trip

Another way to relate to the setting of a story is to take a field trip. Although you may not be able to travel to the exact location where the story takes place, your family may be able to find a place that represents the setting of the book. A field trip can also help you better understand a specific aspect of the story.

While reading the Secret Garden we visited a large botanical garden and also a small community garden to learn more about plants. The one time we were able to visit the location of a book was when our book club read the Kingdom Keeper series, and we visited Walt Disney World to go on our own quests.

Create a Costume

A fun way to “get to know” the main characters of a book is to learn about the type of clothes they wear. Children can think about how the clothes worn by the characters in the story are the same or different that what they might wear. Some of these differences could be based on where the character lived, the type of job they had, the era in which they lived, etc. It’s easy to use clothes, fabrics, and other materials around the house to make costumes and dress-up like a character in a book.

For a while, my kids were interested in medieval history, so they read many stories about kings and knights. We made plenty of swords and shields to reenact the battles they read about. Your kids can even get creative and make costumes based on descriptions of fictional characters like our friends did when reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

5 Easy Ways to Bring Books to Life

Prepare a Meal or Special Dish

Food is one of our favorite ways to learn about any subject! If your book is about a particular region of the world, you can search for recipes unique to that area and make them at home. This is an excellent way to learn about spices, foods, or cooking techniques that are popular in a specific location. Food can also be a useful learning tool when studying history. Recipes and ingredients often change over time so preparing foods from a different time period can be a lot of fun.

Like many middle school students, our children read the The Red Badge of Courage. We spent an afternoon making hard tack, Johnny cakes, and bean soup based on Civil War era recipes. When we read The Indian in the Cupboard our book club found recipes for dishes such as baked pudding and Three Sisters Stew.

A Tea Party based on a book

Host an Event or Celebration

After you make a few dishes and costumes based on your book, why not host an event for your family and friends to really bring the book to life?

Two of our favorite book related events have included a proper English tea party when our book club read Mary Poppins and a wacky birthday celebration with friends based on the adventures of Alice in Wonderland.

We hope your family will enjoy diving into a new book and exploring it in more detail with these fun activities!

What are some of your family’s favorite ways to bring books to life?

10 Ways to Celebrate Teen Read Week

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Next week is Teen Read Week. Started in 1998 by the Young Adult Library Services Association and typically observed the week of Columbus Day, Teen Read Week’s purpose is simple – to encourage teens to read.

10-ways-to-celebrate-teen-read-week

If you have avid readers, they may not need encouragement. For the rest of us, I’ve brainstormed 10 ways to celebrate Teen Read Week.

1. Visit your local library. Because Teen Read Week was started by the Young Adult Library Services Association, chances are most mid-sized and larger libraries will have some activities planned for the week. If not, you can still pick up some new books to read while you’re there.

2. Play reading bingo. I created a reading bingo card for my kids when they were younger, but it’s easily adaptable to teens. When you make the modifications for Teen Read Week, keep in mind that most teens will be reading books that won’t necessarily be completed in a week (not 5 different types, at least) so you may want to give them options for chapters completed or time/number of days spent reading.

3. Read aloud. Just because teens are capable of reading on their own doesn’t mean that family read-aloud time should end. Choose a book that you can all enjoy and snuggle up for some family time each evening.

4. Read a book and watch its movie adaptation. There are so many options for book/movie adaptation combos. You’ve got dozens of choices in the young adult genre alone such as Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, The Giver, The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Twilight, and Divergent.

5. Read a related classic. If your teen has recently read a modern book that references a classic, encourage her to read the classic so that she can fully understand the reference. The Twilight series sparked an interest in Shakespeare for my oldest and she read each of the Shakespeare titles referenced in the four Twilight books, ultimately reading nearly all of Shakespeare’s works.

10-ways-to-celebrate-teen-read-week-pin

6. Find fun ways to tie reading into your regular schoolwork. Okay, okay. We’re homeschoolers, so I know most of us already do this, but I love incorporating engaging books with what we’re already studying. It makes a simple method for planning a high school reading list, but even if you don’t use it to plan an entire list, for Teen Read Week why not find a captivating historical fiction, biography or related literature title to tie in to what you’re studying?

7. Take a reading day – or a reading week! I love Sara’s idea for taking regular reading days and Teen Read Week is the perfect time to give it a try if you’ve never done it. You might even turn it into a reading week. We might be pleasantly surprised at what our kids learn simply by immersing themselves in some great books.

8. Start a series. Encourage your teens to read the first book in a series that sounds intriguing to them. Sometimes, getting hooked on a series is all it takes to turn a reluctant reader into a voracious one.

9. Try an audio book. If you’ve never tried audio books – or it’s been awhile – give them a try this week. Encourage your teens to listen while doing other quiet activities such as drawing, painting, crafting, or walking on the treadmill or around the neighborhood.

10. Host a family book club. Try a family book club for a week. Secure a few copies of the same book (or give everyone their own bookmark, but that gets tricky), allow everyone to read it individually and discuss it at the end of the week.

Do you have ideas for ways to celebrate Teen Read Week? We’ve got almost a week to plan, so leave them in the comments!

This post is linked to Top Ten Tuesday and the Hip Homeschool Hop.