Teaching Writing Skills Early with a Structured Method

How do we do writing? We don’t!… At least until it’s 4th grade and time to start Essentials through Classical Conversations. Little brother had the phone and snuck a picture of us working today😃 . It’s enough. I promise. Your first grader doesn’t need grammar and isn’t ready to comprehend it. And they’re definitely not ready for you to say, “Write me something” as you hand them a scary sheet of lined paper. Slow starts have my vote. My kids did next to nothing for language arts in their younger years. . . As Andrew Pudewa says —- You can’t help too much! First year, they do some writing with lots of help. Second year, a bit more. Third year, push them to be ready for independence. Institute for Excellence in Writing is such a great method, it’s all they need. Truly. . . In class, I teach the kids the program along with all the grammar, so I might be biased. But it really is so good! I’d give up Foundations before Essentials. . Check out the process —- (in my pics) They read a written paper and outline it. Then, using the notes, they write their own paper; my newbie dictated it to me. We work on adding dress ups and different openers and vocabulary words and rewriting. Last step, they will write the final paper (or mom will) and read it to their peers. They’re learning summarizing and preparing for their big research paper in the spring as they now have enough skills to combine multiple sources into one paper. It makes writing a step by step process and so doable! . . You can buy IEW if you aren’t connected with a CC program. But doing it with friends sure makes it more fun! Not to mention the accountability of making sure you get the paper written 😃 . Did I mention that no other homeschool stuff has shown me as much just how different boys are from girls?! At least mine 😃 This kids here is so much easier than her older brother! Hit me up if you have any questions!