Writing in Homeschooling

Writing is my favorite, so I was pretty bummed last fall when it turned out to be the absolute worst part of homeschool. They hated it, resisted any activity, called it stupid, would copy things off a cereal box just to get "credit" for the assignment, and cried. There was lots of crying when I tried to teach writing, from all of us. Not a good situation.

Three things helped me turn this around and get my kids to actually produce some decent writing, without fighting.

The first was a mindset adjustment on my part. I listened to a bunch of Brave Writer podcasts and experimented with a less is more policy,  not just with reading but with every subject. I asked the kids how much writing they thought they could do or how many math problems they could manage. I went with whatever they said on a given day, even if it was "1." This was magic. In terms of writing, it meant that I assigned far less writing than I thought prudent, but they still ended up with plenty of pieces to choose from to include in their portfolio.

The second thing I tried was "Free Write Fridays" - there is a whole series of Friday Free Write blog posts on the Brave Writer site with prompts. This is roughly how Julie Bogart describes doing this activity. Once a week, I would read a prompt, set a timer for 8 minutes, and we would all (including me) sit down and write. When the timer went off I would ask if they wanted to share. If they did fine, if not, fine. We put the pieces in an envelope. After doing this for 8 weeks, I gave them their envelopes, which at that point had 8 drafts in it and asked them to choose one that they wanted to revise into a longer piece. Not the "best" one, but one with potential to be something good. Then we started to move through the writing process with that piece. TWO months to get to the revision part for ONE piece of writing. And they could see that lots of the writing they started was worth abandoning. One of my kids suffers from crippling perfectionism, and this helped to reinforce the idea that not everything you produce has to be perfect, but if you want it to be really good, it's not something that happens on the first try. We humans generate a lot of garbage. 

The third thing I did was let them use Google Docs, including the Voice to Type and spelling/grammar check. Basically, they talk to the computer and it transcribes it for them. The feature is pretty accurate, but still makes lots of mistakes. They have to read it back to themselves to see if it captured what they meant. This tool helped them to see that they had great ideas in their heads, or sometimes they would get what they thought was a good idea onto the page and realize it wasn't as great as they thought. I could also get onto their document and leave my own feedback or suggestions and then they could take it or leave it. Does this even count as writing? I thought it was cheating at first. But then I saw that the kids were focused on different elements of writing instead of getting held up on spelling and phonics and paragraph construction. If you are familiar with the 6 Traits Framework, Voice, Ideas, Word Choice and Sentence Fluency are all important features of great writing and these emerged in their pieces. 

It was a nail biting experience for me to reduce the amount of writing I assigned. I felt negligent and anxious about it. But by June, I could see that they actually were learning to write, to revise their writing and to write across different genres. 

Little Things At the End of June

Last night we had a campfire at my parents' house and the kids ran around and caught lightning bugs. We roasted hot dogs and watched storm clouds blow in. We didn't get home until 10, which is very late for us these days. Other than the weekend we picked M up from the end of his trail run, I haven't been out after dark in months. Max slept fitfully and in the morning when he woke up he told me he had swallowed a Lego and he was really worried about it being caught in his throat. But then he seemed to wake up a little more and we figured out that was just a dream. 

I worked at the restaurant for a little while today.  I was alone and only prepping food and cleaning things up, which is the lowest-stress situation you can have while working in a restaurant. The basement is filled with bar stools and chairs, removed to spread out the customers. I listened to several podcasts in a row without interruption, a rare experience for me. 

On my way home, the man who panhandles on our corner gave me a sack of sandwiches for the kids. I thought it was a very nice gesture, sharing what you cannot use yourself. 

I'm not spending as much time on my front porch as I used to. We have air conditioning now so when it gets very hot we just turn it on and go about our business. Before we had air conditioning it would become too hot to do anything and we would sit on the porch with our feet in buckets of water. Just sitting for hours.... chatting with the neighbor or painting with watercolors or counting cars. It's the end of the month and there are moving trucks everywhere. One is parked across the street. The trees block my view of the porch, but I can hear a man talking loudly on the phone in Spanish. 

There are fireworks going off, of course. From all directions.

There is a man shouting into the booth at the gas station for a particular brand of cigarettes. 

There is the whoosh of a bus pulling away from the stop. Bass from a passing car rattles the flowerpots. 

Everyone going about business as usual. It seems fine, but there's also a sense of anticipation in the air that I can't quite identify. What will happen next? We're all thinking it, but afraid to say it out loud. 

First Homeschool Evaluation

Evaluations for homeschool were waived this year, but I decided to schedule one anyway. I felt if I went through another school year without knowing if my paperwork was adequate, it would stress me out too much. Plus, I wanted to recognize and validate Laurel and Marko's hard work in some way. They wrote letters and I wrote a summary and we put samples of their work in plastic sleeves. It was very satisfying to see them holding the completed portfolios and talking about what they had learned. We met with the evaluator on her back porch and did elbow bumps instead of hand shaking when we finished. It turns out she also went to Pitt to be a reading specialist and we knew a lot of the same people! 

As new homeschoolers, we ditched a lot of what we originally planned. I did a ton of planning and fretting last summer! I even went to a homeschooling conference. Thankfully I didn't spend a ton of money on things we didn't use, but I definitely filled up my computer with files.

I ended up not doing a lot of daily lesson planning in advance. Instead we followed some routines (math, reading, writing and physical education every day....all other subjects once a week) and I would log what we read or did on these monthly log forms. Basically I just jotted down the title of the book or video and maybe a short note about an activity. I sat down with each kid one-on-one every day, but not for very long. We kept a lot of goal lists in our notebooks and referenced them frequently. We came up with some ways to make sure M got to work with the kids. Every few months I would glance over the standards on PDESAS just to see that we were on the right track or if there was something I should steer us towards by finding a book or video on a subject. 

The best mid year purchase I made was Brave Writer Arrow guides, but I also got a lot out of the (free) Brave Writer podcasts.  Julie Bogart's advice that "help helps" and "joy is the best teacher" really helped me break some of my worst teacher-y habits. I used to make kids struggle for so long on their own when they didn't know what the hell they were doing because I thought it was good for them to figure it out on their own. It was painful for everybody. She also helped me trust that my kids could actually master skills and content without doing massive amounts of repetitive work. The key is to spiral back and have them review things periodically. Waiting until my kids were in a good head space to tackle hard material was revolutionary. They become incredibly easy to teach and we both end up learning and having fun with each other. And that last part is really the thing that I'm going to focus on during the coming year...learning new things is fun and a great way to build a relationship.

We had a lot of adventures this year and it was wild to hear Marko and Laurel tell about watching a video on the Spiral Jetty and then driving down a dusty dirt road to actually see it in person. "It's art made of rocks! You can walk on it!" But even these months stuck at home, Marko learned to use a dremel and Laurel learned to double or half recipes and everybody made some music and read a million books. 

The big regret of this year was not connecting with other homeschoolers as much. We traveled a lot and then when we came back the pandemic kind of killed the opportunity for meetups or homeschool classes. We are still in touch with school friends, but it's a really challenging time to foster friendships with children.

Relationships

When the stay at home order was initiated in March, we didn't have a hard time adhering to it. Some of my kids had fevers during those first few weeks so we stayed home to keep our germs to ourselves. We already homeschooled and M had all the equipment to work remotely. During the fall, we left town for 2 1/2 months, so it felt a little bit like that...just our little pod of a family, intensely sinking into relationships with each other. Yes, we missed our friends and family, but it wasn't a hard thing for us to do. As it turned into two months, and then three, we started to really miss our gymnastics classes and horse riding. We cried when Girl Scout camp was canceled. We missed our usual routine of sleepovers with grandparents. 

Now we know some more things about COVID-19, but not really that much more. A hundred thousand people died in just the United States so far, it will easily double this year. We have no idea if people who get mild cases actually suffer long term consequences. We don't know when a vaccine will be available, if you can get it more than once, or even really how to treat the various presentations of the disease. New advances for treatment are being made all the time. I try to focus on that, and not the politicization of the pandemic. 

What I love is how our friends and family adapted to this situation and logged on to Zoom to visit with us, or met us in parks, hung out in our backyard or called us on the phone or wrote letters. Even our librarian has written to us! My kids feel so loved and a sense of connection despite the physical separation. I hope that people will continue to foster a sense of togetherness.