The past couple of days, the kids have been writing their own Haikus during our writing workshop time. Your family might have fun with this too! What is a haiku? It is a traditional form of Japanese poetry. These seem simple as they are only three lines, but the kids found it to be tricky! A haiku has 5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second, and 5...
“Mom, I don’t know what to write!” Have you ever heard that in your homeschool? Today I have five ways you can help kids when they are feeling stuck with their writing. At the end of this post, you can download our 35+ page writing resource packet. It is currently FREE to download! Writing Tips: Writing Resource Packet We’ve been using a writing workshop for a couple of years now. ...
Today I have some writing practice pages to share with you about the concept, “Show Don’t Tell.” The kids and I are spending a number of days talking about this writing strategy. “Show Don’t Tell” helps the reader to experience the story by using descriptions, actions, thoughts, feelings, & emotions. Using this technique helps readers feel like they are right in the middle of the action! Here’s how I explained...
Check out the NEW Language Arts Tab! I have created a resource page with links to dozens of our language arts posts. We have all kinds of resources: Our free grammar pages have always been among the most visited pages on the blog. You’ll find links to our Comma Rules and Practice Pages Apostrophe and Quotation Mark Practice There/They’re/Their and Its/It’s Worksheets and many more!! We have at least 20...
Hi Everyone, This is going to be a bit of a random post so bear with me! I’m going to talk about 3 separate things in this post. 1) Our free calendar printable and homeschool planning pages 2) A free end of year questionnaire for students and parents and 3) a random chat about our Homeschool Writing Workshop. Free Calendar, Homeschool Planning Pages and Homeschool Supply List: First, as many...
How do you teach literary analysis to kids? Helping students study and analyze literature on a deeper level In our new Writing Workshop Unit this January we are going to go look at books more analytically. Some of our mini-lessons have included story structure (building to a climax, etc); finding topics to write about; looking at the opening of books (hooking the reader); using different techniques such as similes, metaphors,...
Language arts is a subject that is always in progress, so it doesn’t make quite as snazzy of a year in review wrap-up, but I thought this might be a good opportunity to share some of our free grammar resources again in a nice, organized table form since those still are so popular. The chart also includes links to our popular Homeschool Writing Workshop series. I’ve also included links to...
I came across this really pretty fall clipart and the kids (and I!!) fell in love with it. We purchased it and decided to use them in our writing workshop. My printer’s out of ink, but we’ll get to it soon. I have two pages of the same image in case anyone wants to print 2 per page. And, if anyone wants me to tweak this in any way (to...
With Halloween coming up and the house decorated with creepy spider webs and stuff, it’s the perfect time to dabble in writing scary stories! I thought I would share the materials I made for the kids for our Writing Workshop. Before they delve in to writing, I wanted to spend some time talking about what makes a story creepy. Scary stories often involve fear and tragedy. Suspense and tension are...
Have your kids read the Plot Chicken? We started our Writing Workshop off with this book. What a great buk, buk!! In fact, I liked it so much that I created a chicken writing rules printable to go along with the book (free to download down below)!!! So, in this post I want to share some of our Writing Workshop Mini-Lessons about the Story Writing Process & Story Structure. The...
Yesterday was our very first day school. We had such an amazing summer (and more about that in another day or so), but it is also great to be back in the groove again! I started the day with my new morning routine (I’ll talk about that more in another post too!), but it left me organized, energized, and ready to go with the kids! ED, of course, was the...
At the beginning of the week, I thought it would helpful for the kids to think about some fundamental questions about writing… Why do we write? Why do we read? What makes for a good story? What makes a story interesting? What inspires you? What kinds of techniques can we use in our writing? What writing habits work best for you? And finally, I had the kids brainstorm alternative words for...
What skills do I want the kids to have in order to become successful writers? For this post, I shared a list of some of the language and literary skills I want the kids to build in elementary and middle school. These are topics and terms I want the kids to be familiar with. As they get older I hope they are able to use and incorporate these naturally into their own...
So, what does our family do for our homeschool language arts curriculum? I’ll share what we’ve been using for 1st through 6th grades. Over the past week, I’ve gotten three separate emails and FB messages asking about what we use for language arts — spelling, grammar and literature. It must be that time of year again when we start thinking about our plans for next year. I’ll start with Spelling....
