Home School Online

For many homeschool parents, teaching writing is a major source of frustration and friction.  Why?  For starters, there’s the question of their parents’   ambitions for them.  Many homeschooling moms planned and dreamed about how they would mold their children’s mind by teaching them in two big areas: a love of reading and of writing.  The reading will open their children’s minds to an endless supply of fiction and fantasy to learn about history, science, our world, religion, and ideas. In writing, they hope their children will learn to express themselves elegantly  while exploring their own thoughts and creativity.

While I don’t have any statistics, I think it’s the writing area where most parents get really frustrated.   While some percentage of kids have trouble learning to read, a much larger number have trouble learning to write well.   And, frankly, the parents probably are less skilled and patient at teaching writing.  Also, when kids learn to read, they are younger and I suspect many parents start running out of patience as the kids get older. And the nature of teaching writing makes it very difficult for parents.

Also, many parents are concerned that they themselves do not write well. Sometimes without reason, sometimes justly so.  So their insecurity creates some tension. Many parents are confused by the twin goals of teaching writing. On one hand, like drawing and other artistic forms of self- expression, one goal of writing is creativity to draw out thoughts and ideas. On the other hand, teaching writing also involves mastering how to structure sentences, paragraphs and essays for clarity and efficiency.  In teaching writing, the student should show a mastery of sentence structure, vocabulary, spelling with all its nuances of plurals and possessives, and of grammar.  So should a parent who is teaching writing focus on creative expression or GUM (Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics)?  Many parents are clumsy in handling these two often-conflicting directions.

And, when the students start to succeed in learning to write well, oddly, the writing lessons can sometimes get even more tense. Remember, in teaching writing, there is no answer key.  Who is to say if a student’s word choice or sentence structure is optimal or not? Who is to say if an essay is unnecessarily wordy or beautifully lyrical? If Hemingway and Mark Twain’s writing style is so different, how is a parent to guide a budding seventh grader writer in questions of style?  And the kids, proud of their creative efforts, tend to be overly-sensitive to any discussion of their writing style. Many students emerge as writers in early adolescence and of course, that does not help reduce tensions.

I have no cure-all for these issues. I created Time4Writing.com as a resource for homeschool parents who want some help teaching writing.  Oddly, I too tread some of this ground  in creating this writing program. Here’s a few examples.

1. I started with ambitions of teaching creative expression such as story-telling and exploring thoughts.  Once I launched the courses, I found that the overwhelming need brought to us were students who needed help with basic sentences and paragraphs. Even teaching essay structure was too ambitious for the level of many of our first hundred students. I redirected our course development towards writing mechanics to help students at not just elementary but also middle and high school level, with writing mechanics.
2. I found that it wasn’t just homeschoolers who signed up, but many students in schools that weren’t getting the hands-on feedback that they needed to improve their writing skills.
3. Sensitivities. I started the course by hiring only experienced licensed writing teachers who had a deep interest in helping students write and were well-aware of the sensitive nature of teaching writing. Nevertheless, I found that many students and their parents are very sensitive to anything other than positive feedback and that the teachers, some new to online teaching, needed to build a new awareness of how feedback can feel in cyberspace.  The students take their teachers feedback very seriously.  We had some vigorous in-house discussions in which we struggled to build an online teaching methodology that balances the need to maintain a positive relationship while also identifying and correcting writing errors.  Many of the same questions of the arbitrariness of formal writing styles and the methods of interpreting them were evoked.

Many parents find that teaching writing is difficult and it’s often a good idea to shift tactics and do some delegation. Time4Writing.com is a set of  online writing courses taught by professional writing teachers. These teachers are specialists in their areas.  The courses are eight weeks in length and reasonably priced. Time4Writing has been created by Time4Learning, whose  integrated K-8  online home school curriculum is indepth and priced at a surprisingly affordable $19.95 per month. Many parents were initially skeptical about the quality of Time4Learning given the low price.  Thousands have now learned that quality can be affordable. Time4Writing too has a surprising amount of substance packed into one eight week $99 course. If you have questions about Time4Writing, you can ask in our parent community about Time4Writing or on your choice of parenting homeschool forums such as those managed by Homeschool.com and the Homeschool Swap.

How different can you make the summer? How long a “total” vacation is OK for an elementary or middle school student?  Can they feel like they’re having a total vacation but can you slip in enough education to keep them from backsliding?  You know that a two or three month summer vacation can result in serious back-sliding. 

Here’s my answer to this question:
1. A summer reading program. Fit it into everyday. Maybe for 30 minutes after lunch. Maybe after dinner.  Maybe it’s comic books or other light-reading. But thou shall read daily!  My daughter had a trip to Rome planned: I had her (high school) read Angels and Demons.  Ok, maybe it wasn’t the best choice, but it did give her some perspective on what she was about to see.
2. Explore ideas. Talk about history and social studies and math as you see its traces in your travels.
3. An alternative summer study program for 30 minutes per day. And I recommend Time4Learning.  Depending on your child’s needs, you can focus on math, language arts, or do both.  Take a look. 

And I’ll quote Time4Learning:

Your child works hard during the school year and needs a summer vacation in order to come back refreshed. The sensible part of you knows that it would be foolish to waste the summer months, since a long vacation without study can result in backsliding. The sensitive part of you feels guilty about asking your kids to do work while their friends are spending their vacation doing other things.

 Here’s a solution:

Have you noticed how much your child enjoys using the computer? If you haven’t, you should. Kids are constantly surfing the web. Whether they’re checking out a video game or chatting with their friends, they are (without a doubt) online. So, it makes sense to turn to the web for a fun alternative to summer school. Time4Learning’s online interactive curriculum provides a web based summer learning program that they won’t mind using. In fact, they might even like it!

Time4Learning’s Web Based Summer Learning Program might be your answer.

Another great idea for summer study, how about an online writing course? You know how much children like learning on the computer and writing skills, when properly taught, are fun. Children like trying to express themselves and learning the skills to do so. Unlike other subjects which can involve trying to absorb all sorts of information, there is really no memorization in learning to write, it’s all skill building.

 This spring and summer, take a break. Parents relax. Enroll your student in a Time4Writing.com writing class in which their licensed teachers do the work. And surprise, your reluctent writer who has been resisting writing practice and any feedback might emerge.  Take a look and find the writing course that is right for your students.

Oh, and why should the kids have all the fun? Take a writing course yourself.  Remember, most of what you say to your children will have no impact. No impact. But, they will definitely take note of how you behave. Sure, you talk a good game about education.  When was the last time you invested your time and energy in your own education? You want your kids to take education seriously. My advice is to stop talking about it and go learn something.

 And what could be more fun than a creative writing 2.0? I’m talking about a blog writing course. Learn to write using today’s hot new media. People who have taken this course rave about it. They make new friends, they learn new skills, some start new careers, they find new ways to express themselves, and they do it in about two hours per week from the comfort of their own home on their own schedule.  Take a look at the course on writing your blog.