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Lorraine Curry's


Easy Homeschooling Eletter


Issue #77 September 2006

Excerpts from Newest Book by our Guest Authors!

In this Issue

 

 

Making a Musical Flourish

By Cathi-Lyn Dyck


The fastest way to add a rich musical streak to your homeschool is: Just listen to it. It's that simple. The tricky part is getting the radio station or the CD player on track with the program.

With young kids, it's easy to make the music choices. If you'rebeginning to homeschool with older kids, you may have a bit of a mutiny the first time you put on Beethoven. For that matter, you may not like stepping outside your favourite styles that much yourself.


But it's important to stretch our thinking! Learning is about expanding experience, knowledge and understanding. So here are some suggestions to add music without having to be a maestro.


Cathi-Lyn Dyck is a former unschooled student, visual artist, musician and writer. Also see her chapter on Thinking Critically. She lives in Manitoba, Canada with her husband and four children. The Dycks have a twenty-five-acre spread where they produce vegetables, natural honey, wild (but not uncultivated) children, original artwork and music and random helpful writings. You can visit their farm at:

www.mts.net/~lzycre

 

See Easy Homeschooling Companion for ideas on building literacy through the classics.

Buy with Easy Homeschooling Techniques and save!

 

 

 

 

Evaluating Writing

By Janice Campbell



Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. -William Strunk, Jr. (1869-1946), The Elements of Style.

The evaluation process is very important in helping the student learn to write. Ben Franklin apparently evaluated his own writing, using published writing as a standard of comparison. I would not expect most students to be motivated enough to do that, but parents can learn to evaluate by reading extensively. If you are not comfortable with your skill in evaluation, you may be able to find another homeschool mom or a friendly English major to evaluate your student's work and provide feedback. You can also seize the opportunity to improve your own skills, and learn to discern good writing by reading books such as On Writing Well by William Zinsser or Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. Writing is the most permanent form of communication, and when you take the time to improve your own skills, you demonstrate to your students that you believe writing is important.

One of the best things you can do for your student is to use a rubric to evaluate writing. I suggest using the 6-Traits rubric which offers guides for evaluating student writing in the following six areas: Ideas and Content; Organization; Voice; Word Choice; Sentence Fluency; and Conventions. The 6-Traits rubric provides objective standards in each of the six listed areas. For each writing assignment, you read your student's work, evaluating each area as you go. I use plus, equals, and minus symbols beside each trait to indicate how well I think the student has performed. If he or she has exceeded expectations, I award a plus. If expectations are met, an equal sign; and if the trait needs more work, a minus sign. This allows the student to see exactly what he or she needs to work on in the next assignment.You can find a detailed assessment model at the link below. If this link has changed by the time you read this book, please visit my website (end of chapter) for an updated link.

www.nwrel.org/assessment/toolkit/98/traits/index.html

Coming Full Circle

Finally, remember that the process of teaching writing does not begin with composition, but with reading. Without adequate input, a student cannot be expected to produce quality output. In order to avoid frustrating students and causing them to feel that they hate writing, you must provide plenty of information in the form of books to read, plenty of practice with the mechanical skills of copying, narration, and dictation, and plenty of time for the development and organization of ideas. It is just as difficult to wring water from a dry sponge as it is to extract meaningful writing from a child who has not been saturated in the written word. As a homeschool parent, you have the opportunity to gently shepherd your child into a world of literary delight, so relax and enjoy the process. You can do it!

© 2006 by Janice Campbell.

Janice Campbell is an alternative education specialist, writer, and speaker, and the author of Transcripts Made Easy: Your Friendly Guide to High School Paperwork, Get a Jump Start on College! A Practical Guide for Teens, and the Zeitgeist Literature series. Gor more articles and resources to help you homeschool through high school and beyond, visit her website at:

www. EverydayEducation.com

Contain Your School

By Marilyn Rockett


Contain Your School
By Marilyn Rockett

Containers are wonderfully useful when you want to organize your school and home, and they are peace treaties between you and your children. When children know exactly where to find their school materials, there is less conflict, and you can spend your valuable time with learning and other important activities. You may not choose to do "school" in just one place in your home, but storing supplies and materials in one place while keeping them portable is usually easier and more efficient. That storage place can be a bookshelf in an accessible place, a cabinet the kids can reach-but you can close when you want a neater look, or low shelves built into a closet. For each student, use a plastic dishpan, marked with the child's name. Inside the pans, put notebooks, schoolbooks, pencils, rulers and any other materials that each child needs. Label the supplies with each child's name, and you will easily see who hasn't cleaned up his or her own mess. These pans are easy to transport wherever you need them. If you use a dining table that you must clear, the pans make it easy and quick for your children to pick up their own things and return them to the storage area.


Another helpful container is a large basket or plastic crate by the back door for anything that must go with you when you leave-library books, items for the support group meeting, dry cleaning, a return to a store and so forth. This prevents your scrambling around looking for the items you need when you plan a trip out. You can even pick up the basket or crate and take it with you to the car.
To keep preschoolers entertained while you work with older children, find a special place for an activity center just for them. Use plastic bins or pans for various materials that suit your preschoolers' interests, containing each activity in a separate pan. Here are some ideas to stimulate your thinking:


Look for ways to use containers in your home and school for many different purposes. Even a mess looks better when you pile it into a container.

Marilyn Rockett and her husband, Chesley, home educated the younger three of their four sons for fifteen years until their youngest son completed high school studies in 1996. They have six home-taught grandchildren. Marilyn is the author of Homeschooling at the Speed of Life: Balancing Home, School, and Family in the Real World (B&H Publishing Group, 2007). She speaks for homeschool events and women's groups. Contact her at marilyn@MarilynRockett.com.

www.MarilynRockett.com

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