| Copyright 2006 Julie Shepherd Knapp |
| Copyright 2006 Julie Shepherd Knapp. All rights reserved. |
| about the book |
| The Homeschool Diner's Guide to Homeschooling by Subject Language Arts for Homeschoolers Fiction and Non-Fiction Writing Resources by Julie Shepherd knapp, copyright 2006 Writing prompts, online tutorials, books, programs, and tutors to help students improve their writing skills. If you use a School-at-Home approach, writing assignments will be included within your child's language arts curriculum. If you are following an alternative homeschool approach writing may also be addressed as part of the philosophy. Many alternative approaches give guidance to parents on how and when to teach children to write, and what types of writing assignments will encourage the traits valued by each of the educational philosophies, such as encouraging children to keep journals, or write narrative descriptions of what they have read or observed, or copy passages from great literature. If you are supplementing your current approach, or constructing your own writing curriculum you will find that there are many, many different types of resources available to help you teach about writing and to help your child learn basic and advanced writing techniques. This is actually a good thing, because children can be so different in their writing likes, dislikes, and needs. Some children seem to be naturals at creative writing -- they are enthusiastic about sharing their thoughts, and there are days when they seem to almost bubble over with ideas for stories and other creative writing projects. Other children have a hard time with creative writing, such as making up stories, but love to share knowledge about their favorite topics, or about subjects they have researched -- they prefer to write non-fiction pieces, such as reports, research papers, how-to articles, or opinion/persuasive articles. Other children don't enjoy sharing their ideas at all, find it hard to think of topics to write about, and have great difficulty getting their thoughts on paper. These Reluctant Writers need help finding their niche in the writing world. Some reluctant writers are actually just late-bloomers who will become quite good at writing when the time is right for them. However, if you have a child who seriously struggles with both handwriting and productive writing it is possible that he or she has a disability of written expression, called dysgraphia. You can read more about dysgraphia and other learning disabilities in the Homeschool Diner's Special Needs section. So, take a look at the resources in these sections and see if any of them look helpful for your child's particular interests and needs. Many online vendors have sample pages of each product, and most educational publishers will send you sample pages on request. If you don't see what you're looking for here, do a Google search for "homeschool writing curriculum" , or visit an online vendor such as Rainbow Resources and do some more looking. Writing Curriculum, Programs, Prompts, How-To Books and Other Resources Online Writing Classes and Writing Tutors Creative Ideas for Writing, Fun Resources, and Online Enrichment Poetry Writing and Resources How to Help Reluctant Writers and Children Who Hate to Write Related Resources Creative Kids Magazine -- the nation's largest magazine written for and by kids, kids can submit essays to the "Write On" section A list of kids' Publishers -- from author Brooke Bessesen WORD the Official Blog of Read and Writing magazines from Weekly Reader -- tips and submission suggestions, kids' writing contests, etc. (Son of) Citation Machine -- free online tool to put reference citations in the proper format (choose from MLA, APA, or Chicago Manual of Style) Avoiding Plagerism -- from the OWL at Purdue Plagiarism: What It Is and How to Recognize and Avoid It -- examples of good and bad paraphrasing, from Indiana University Avoiding Plagiarism -- examples of paraphrasing and practice paragraphs, from the Rio Salado College Online Guiding the Gifted to Honest Work -- helping kids avoid plagerism when writing reports by increasing the critical thinking needed to write them (aimed at gifted but applies to all students) SmartWriters.com Young Writers -- helpful articles, tips on getting published, contest announcements, links to other resources A Teen's Guide to Getting Published: Publishing for Profit, Recognition, and Academic Success a book by Jessica Dunn StyleWriter software -- a word processing add-on that flags poor writing, gives suggestions to improve writing style. Super Kids Software Reviews: Typing Programs -- a nice resource for choosing a program The Visual Thesaurus -- an online visual representation of thesaurus entries, similar to "mind-mapping" or flow charts, subscription, free trial Scored Writing Samples -- for grades 3, 5, 6, and 8 -- four types of writing are analyzed for various elements and scored from low quality to high quality, with explanations and comments, useful as a sample of typical work at different grade levels. Make Your Own Books - several options for easy, inexpensive book binding kits (a great incentive for story-writing!) Informal Logic -- a review of the informal reasoning that occurs in the course of personal exchange, advertising, political debate, legal argument, and in other types of social commentary The English Assignment that Ate the American Economy by Margot Carmichael Lester -- how teaching the 5 paragraph essay is ruining the development of real-world writing skills in American children A Celebration of Women Writers -- lists women authors from 300 A.D. to 20th century, includes many free online texts and biographical info |
| (back to) language arts |