writing

An effective homeschool writing program for middle school and high school can be as unique as your student. There is no one-size-fits-all writing prog...

I quit "teaching" literature in 5th grade and let my daughter pick books (from a list of classic literature) to read with no formal  instruction. She enjoyed this approach and has been a voracious reader over the years. After reading Hamlet, she decided she enjoyed Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies and read several of them. At 16, she just took the Analyzing and Interpreting Literature CLEP exam and scored very well. She now has 6 English college credits!  I...

Are you ever unsure about how many English credits to give your students? Does your student spend more time on English assignments than they do on any other subject? These are common conundrums and you are not alone! Can composition and literature be documented as two separate credits?My student spends an hour on composition and an hour on literature each day. In answer to this I will tell you that there are some classes that simply take...

I often get questions about how to create real classes for unusual interests like writing music for movies.  How do you create classes for fun?  More importantly, how do you write a boring course description about fascinating non-classroom learning? My Gold Care Club member asked for me to look over her course descriptions.  When I saw this one, I flipped!  This is just WONDERFUL, and a great example of how to take a student's interest and...

Math and science may scare some people, but I was intimidated by English. I think math and science are wonderful, because there is always a right answer and wrong answer. Unfortunately, English isn't that way. English can be very difficult to teach and difficult to correct. How do you know writing is "right" or "wrong" when it could be just the voice of the writer? I finally decided that my job as a homeschool parent was...

Do you remember the dreaded analogies in high school?  Here are some examples from our past: Cat is to meow as dog is to bark Poverty is to wealth as hunger is to food. Designed to encourage critical thinking, analogies used to be included in the SAT test. But wait!  Analogies aren't on the test anymore!  For the past few years, the SAT has eliminated all analogies, and has something even MORE fun instead!  When they...