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How Will You Teach Writing This Year? (part 1)
by Kerry
Beck
When I first started homeschooling, I decided not to buy a Writing
Curriculum! Why? Because all the programs I
reviewed were activities I could do on my own. I taught fifth
grade for six years and most homeschool writing programs were like my
public school writing curriculum, teaching students "what to write".
Well, that was until I discovered Andrew Pudewa’s Institute
for Excellence in Writing (IEW). IEW had a flagship product,
Teaching Writing: Structure and Style, that intrigued me. Mr.
Pudewa did not spend a lot of time brainstorming ideas for students to
write. Instead he spent the bulk of his curriculum on "how to
write". This was a new concept to me because the biggest
problem my students had, like all other students, was what to write
about.
Andrew’s approach to writing solves the "what to write about"
problem by simply telling the students what to write about.
His program spends more time teaching "structures" or outlines for a
variety of writings, offering lesson plans for writing
process. Depending on the type of writing and your purpose
for writing, you can use different outlines to organize your thoughts.
In addition to teaching structures, Teaching Writing also shows
students how to improve their writing "style". Thus, the name
of the program is Teaching Writing: Structure and Style.
Students learn a variety of ways to vary their writing style.
Mr. Pudewa shows students how to dress up their sentences with strong
verbs and quality adjectives. Other dress-ups include adverbs
and clauses. After mastering the dress ups, students learn
how to open their sentences in a variety of methods.
In my next article (part 2), I will share a simple activity you can use
with your own children this week (or the first week of
school). If your older students struggle with writing, this
is a great place to start.
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© Kerry Beck, 2008
You have permission to reprint this article, as long as you
don’t make any changes and include the bio below.
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Kerry Beck encourages homeschool moms and classroom teachers with writing lesson plans. You can get her free mini-course about Teaching Writing Easily at http://www.howtoteachwriting.com/. |
