How Did You Prepare Your Children for College Writing?

The person who asked how I prepared my kids for college writing was likely expecting to hear the name of a fabulous writing curriculum that we used. But we didn’t. There are several well-known intense writing instruction programs that are popular with homeschoolers, but I didn’t use any of those. Honestly, I haven’t had my kids spend a lot of time writing; we don’t work on it regularly every day nor necessarily, every week. I don’t teach my kids that way. To me that’s boring and tedious and isn’t likely to bring about a lot of learning. Instead,

Writing Test

During my daughter’s second week in College Composition 1101, the class was given a surprise test.

“Some of you really shouldn’t be in this class. Your writing skills aren’t strong enough,” the professor told them before giving a test that would be used to determine if they really ought to be in the class despite having scored well enough on an entrance exam to sign up for the class.

A Day of Homeschooling

What does a day of homeschooling in our house look like? Every day is different. So I’ll share now and then about a recent day.

Today’s learning was driven by two things: Our writing club and getting ready for the county fair. While we generally work on math (high school geometry for my teens) daily, we did no math at all today. Since we school year-round, I don’t worry about skipping days here and there. I’d rather them miss a few days here and there than take a two-month vacation and come back having forgotten all they learned.

Instead, we began the morning with writing. My teens began with editing some pieces written by others in the writing club.

Teaching Toddlers Pre-Writing Skills

This year I started a writing club through our homeschool support group for kids old enough to write. Patterned after some writing groups for adult writers that I’ve attended, the students each bring a piece of writing and read it to the others and ask for critiques. The idea is to encourage the children to write something well enough that they won’t be embarrassed to read it to their peers. (Use that peer pressure for good, to encourage them to put forth their best effort.) In addition, they hopefully learn to listen to others and to give gentle, but helpful, advice and perhaps learn to improve their own writing in the process.