Coaching the Writing Process

My newest article is up over at Heart of the Matter and I'd love for you to take a peek! It's called Coaching the Writing Process and it's all about how to work with your children and their current skill set to help them to be better writers- without a lot of curriculum!



I think it’s fair to say we all want our kids to be good writers. Some children are natural writers and some are not. They will do anything to get out of writing even one sentence. Have you ever given much thought as to why we want our kids to write well? Is it because our jobs will be easier as homeschooling parents? Is it so they can pass tests and do well in school? Is it so they can excel in college or another vocation? What makes writing so important? Homeschooling parents try lots of different resources and struggle to find just the thing that will best help their children to write. Surely, there will be something out there that will do the trick!

Today I’d like to share with you the goal I have for my kids in writing and how we have purposed to reach that goal over the years with each individual child without a lot of formal programming. The one writing goal I have for my children is that they will be good written communicators. What does it mean to be a good written communicator? It means that when the intended audience reads your writing, it will be effective in its purpose- to persuade, to explain, or to tell a story.

Often, when people ask me how we do grammar, spelling and writing in our homeschool, they are surprised and somewhat skeptical when I say we just forge ahead meeting goals without using a curriculum. We do a lot of writing within the context of our unit studies which gives us a great wealth of authentic writing practice. Most people though, want the nuts and bolts of how we improve mechanics and spelling. They seem disappointed when I tell them that it is through these more authentic experiences that we focus on the building blocks of writing...

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