Learning how to write a story takes time and is developed in stages. It involves much more than plot. Starting from scratch means creating a setting, characters and dialogue. That is a big task, but we can help. If we want our children to learn how to write a story, we need to prime the pump with creative writing ideas. If we provide some of the elements, it makes it easier for them to start creating. Once they are creating, they will produce. With production comes refinement. The more they write, the better they will write.

Two simple techniques are story retelling and story extension. Begin with a familiar, well-loved story. Fairy tales are excellent, even for older kids. I used this technique in my French classes when we were learning The Three Little Pigs (my junior highs were in shock when we began). Eventually, we retold the story so that nothing changed--neither the characters, nor the plot, but the story was restated in new language. Kids are often very clever in the way they retell the story. When they retell, they are allowed to add as many details as they like as long as the meaning, the characters and the sequence of the story remain unchanged.

Story extension takes the story past the original ending. It answers the questions what then and what if . . . ? You would be surprised how creative your children will be when they need not invent the characters or the setting. Even the basic plot line has been previously developed. All they have to do is fine tune and add the odd character or twist in plot. It gives them a foundation and parameters, freeing them to take risks with the part for which they are responsible. This is much more manageable and makes them more comfortable. You should help them get started by brainstorming with them (that's the grist). Ask some questions. Stir their imagination pot. Prime the Pump.

Once they have experience using familiar stories, you can give them a picture and use the ideas in it for grist. Start a file of good pictures with interesting characters and some kind of action (avoid landscapes). Magazines are great for these. Then you can prompt them by asking things like:

"What is a good name for the girl in the picture? Where do you think she is going? Where did she come from? Why is she smiling/sad/angry? What do you think she is saying to the dog? Who is the other person? What will happen if it starts to rain/snow?"

You get the idea. The possibilities are endless. Remember that a pump cannot pump air and few of us can pull ideas from a vacuum. Give your kids some grist (creative writing ideas) to get them going. Then watch them create. Happy writing!

So how do we teach children to write without dominating their work? Learning how to homeschool well means tackling this prickly problem. We are so eager for our kids to succeed, that we can't keep from sticking our fingers into their pudding, but we do so at great cost--their creative expression and any hope that they might enjoy writing. By following a few basic principles, we can free our kids up to express themselves in writing and maybe learn to enjoy the process. What we need to do is to aim for fluency, not perfection.

Practice Free Writing

First, we must allow them to write freely as often as possible. That means lots and lots of rough drafts, with no need for multiple rewrites and a final, "good" copy. Whose idea was it for children to correct and recopy every word they write? Talk about tedium! If we cut back on the rewrites, they could write twice as much. A steady diet of free writing is essential. Every professional writer that I know has some sort of journal for this type of writing.

Avoid Over Correcting

Parents can be sticklers for over correcting children's work, but homeschooling well means motivating kids to write, not teaching them to hate it. We wonder why children write as little as possible, use short, uninteresting vocabulary and hate writing, Here's why: the shorter the piece, the less there is to correct and rewrite. Smart kids use short, boring words to reduce the chance of making errors.

A boy I knew once asked his mother, "How do you spell octopus?" She replied, "Just write fish. At least you can spell that." What a sad lesson he learned that day! An overemphasis on correctness of spelling, grammar, neatness and punctuation will destroy creativity and will teach a child to write less. The more they play the game of pleasing adults instead of freely expressing themselves, the sooner they will learn to hate writing.

Provide More Time for Experience

Why do we insist on chaining our kids to a desk and pencil? Instead of spending precious time recopying text, an activity that serves little purpose, they should be running, playing and exploring--gaining experience from which to write more powerful and authentic stories, poems and reports. Experience is the raw material for writing so the richer one's experience, the more that person has to write about. And experience in recopying text is not the stuff of great works of art!

Aim for Fluency, Not Perfection

Professional writers know that the more we write, the better we write. Parents and teachers often haven't figured that out. If we would first encourage fluency in their writing by letting them write whatever comes into their heads without second guessing their ideas, without worrying about how to spell it, punctuate it or write it neatly, imagine what they might create! Why not only require them to edit one out of every ten pieces? And how about if they don't recopy any of it? Let them write the original draft on every second line, make a neat stroke through the word that they are editing and write the new word above it. Then on with creating!

Compare Learning Writing to Learning to Talk

When they learned to talk, we adored their babbling. We didn't bother to correct their baby talk, and wonder of wonders, that babbling eventually turned into well-structured speech. Let's apply the same principle to writing. They need to babble a lot on paper to learn to write well. They don't need constant correction; rather, they need the freedom to explore their language. If they read good books, are read to regularly and do a lot of practice writing, they will eventually develop their own style and will learn to correct their errors. How, you ask? That takes me to the topic of editing, which I will save for a future article. For now, please step back and let your children write. For their sake, aim for fluency, not perfection.

Dianne Dachyshyn is a freelance writer and a motivational speaker who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.  She works as a home education facilitator, helping homeschooling families plan their programs and deal with challenges.  Dianne is passionate about teaching children to write.  Visit her website at HomeschoolWell.com.

Editing is best taught as an isolated skill and from the time children are old enough to rework a piece of writing, they are old enough to self-edit and peer edit. Recopying a piece of writing that has been corrected to death by an adult is not editing and it serves no good purpose beyond penmanship practice. If you want to teach children to write well, your best bet is to teach them to self-edit and peer edit.

Focus on Isolated Skills

Children learn to edit best when they focus on isolated skills like punctuation or capitalization and then apply that skill to their writing. When you read through their many pieces of free writing, take a mental note of what needs work. It may be just the proper use of capitals. Teach a mini-lesson on that skill (ten minutes maximum) and practice it on a worksheet or by correcting a few model sentences. Always use impersonal examples. Never use your children's work to demonstrate errors.

Let Them Apply What They Have Learned

Now let the children choose one piece of writing from their portfolios and apply what they have learned to improve it. Begin with one skill and as you get good at this, increase it to two or three for young children and a few more for older kids. If they work on capitalization this week and punctuation next week, they could work on capitalization and punctuation the third week. No one can take care of everything in one assignment and children should not be expected to. Not if we want them to ever enjoy writing, that is. Of course we want them to do it all, but learning is a process and we need to take small manageable bites if we are ever going to polish off this T-bone.

Let Them Do It Themselves, Beginning with Self-Editing

Once we give them the responsibility we must back off and let them do it themselves. That means that you do not sit with them and point out each error. They get to do it themselves. It's far more satisfying and less humiliating if they correct their own work. They won't do it perfectly, but they don't have to. When you stop requiring perfection and teach editing as an isolated skill, it becomes more enjoyable and you can accept that it's not necessary to catch every little mistake. The goal is to learn, not to be perfect, and learning is a process that takes time.

Next, Try Peer Editing

This can be a lot of fun. The kids follow the same process but this time they swap papers with a sibling or friend. Remember, you are focusing on one or two skills at a time. Each child is responsible for finding mistakes relating to those skills. If your kids' work has too many errors to address at one time, ask them to find a fixed number of mistakes. For example: Find three words that break the capitalization rules. The last part of a peer edit is when the kids sit together and explain the edits to each other (you are still not involved at this point). This is a great reinforcement of their learning and kids like playing the teacher.

They Just Might Enjoy It!

Experience has taught me that kids enjoy editing when it is presented this way. They feel good when they know that the task they are given is manageable. The reason most kids hate writing is that we expect them to correct everything at once, and that is overwhelming. Who could do it all? By focusing on isolated skills, teaching them to self-edit and peer edit and letting the kids apply it themselves, we empower them to improve their writing. Just don't be surprised if they end up liking it.

Dianne Dachyshyn is a freelance writer and a motivational speaker who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.  She works as a home education facilitator, helping homeschooling families plan their programs and deal with challenges.  Dianne is passionate about teaching children to write.  Visit her website at HomeschoolWell.com.

Looking for a way to increase your child's spelling ability and improve spelling scores?  Here is a simple strategy used in Syllable Savvy that can be used for all students: average spellers, or those above or below average.

This method can be used to imprint the correct spelling of a particularly troublesome word.  Or it can be used with your students' entire spelling list.

Here's how it works

First, take a paper and fold it in thirds the long way, making three columns.

In the first column (left) write the spelling word the way it sounds. You can go all out and learn all the dictionary phonetic markings, or make it simple.  The idea is that students will see the word written the way they hear it.

In the middle column, write the word the way it is normally written.

Finally, in the third (right) column, write the word in syllables.  At the end of each syllable, write the number of letters in that syllable. I usually write that as a superscript. It can also be written above the syllable.

Here is an example:

• 1st column:  ug nol ij mint
• 2nd column:  acknowledgment
• 3rd column:  ac-2   know-4  ledg-4  ment-4

Here's how the student will study the words:

1. Fold the worksheet so only the first column is seen.  The student writes the word on a seperate sheet of paper.
2. The student then unfolds the worksheet and self-corrects the word.  They write the number of letters they correctly wrote for each syllable.  If the entire word is correct, they place a star on the line.<br>

Why this method works

This method improves spelling scores by focusing the students' attention on each letter.  Studying the syllables reinforces common spelling patterns.  In a word like "acknowledgment" the student might incorrectly write "acknowledgement" day after day and not notice their error.  They then get it wrong on the spelling test, after studying it incorrectly all along.

Why do we have the three columns?  The phonetic column allows the student to work independently.  A second person is not needed to read the list to them in order for them to practice their words without seeing them simultaneously.  There are other effective methods for helping the student to study the words independently.

This is the Syllable Savvy Spelling strategy. Watch spelling scores improve as complex and difficult words are mastered with this simple strategy.

According to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), language arts programs are composed of "composition, language, literature, media, and reading." And, according to many experts in child development, reading and writing are two of the most important components of a language arts program, especially for early learners. In fact, reading and writing are so vital to young students that they are viewed as the basis for success in nearly every other academic subject.

Language Arts Instruction for Homeschooling Parents

Many studies and publications exist to help teachers understand the importance of reading comprehension in subjects other than language arts, but one of the most important tools that educators can provide children with is their own ability to understand that children learn to read differently, at their own pace, and in their own way. This understanding is especially important in the homeschool environment where parents and homeschool educators are relatively free to employ whatever teaching methods work best for the individual child.

Reading instruction is a component of the language arts curriculum that should be introduced across multiple subject matter content. Children ultimately have to understand what they read in a variety of textbooks, not just as part of a language arts class. Yet, reading instruction begins long before formal education begins, especially for homeschooling parents and educators.

Teaching Reading to Preschoolers

Teaching reading and other language arts skills to preschool learners relies heavily on a concept known as modeling. Modeling merely means exposing young children to the types of behaviors and habits we want them to learn. Many parents and homeschooling educators employ this kind of instruction naturally, without giving it much thought.

To model reading behavior to young children, adults and other children should read to, and with, early learners. This type of instruction can take place from the moment of birth and can significantly impact a child's love for reading. In addition to a love for reading and stories, children who are read to at an early age learn skills such as book knowledge and word appreciation.

Book knowledge is the ability to recognize book formats and purpose. Early readers learn how to hold a book properly, to read English from left to right, how pictures supplement the story, and that books have basic components such as a front and back, spine, pages, covers, and more. Children automatically learn these things at a conceptual level long before they understand the purpose of each component.

Children who have been exposed to reading modeling also learn beginning phonics. Children who are ready, learn basic letter sounds, word and phrase inflection, and the alphabet. From this point, children will often enjoy participating in simple letter recognition and pronunciation games. They probably don't recognize the fact that they are learning!

Teaching Reading to Students in Kindergarten and First Grade

Ideally, children who have been introduced to reading modeling behavior enter kindergarten and first grade ready and eager to read on their own. For most children, the formal teaching of reading begins in these grades. Most educators, homeschool or otherwise, use a combination of phonics programs, worksheets, and actual books to teach reading. These are all tried and true methods and can result in reading success. A relatively new methodology, syllabics, extends the focus of phonics programs on the sounds associated with the consonant letters to simple rules for correctly using the variable sounds associated with the vowels.

But fundamental characteristic of homeschooling are the freedom and flexibility to modify and tailor any learning program to the child's learning style. This means that children who need extra phonics or syllabics instruction, additional reading practice, or who learn better with computer software or worksheets than traditional instruction, are taught using whatever teaching method works best for them. In the early grades, reading and phonics, supplemented by introductions to syllabics, take precedence over vocabulary, grammar, and even spelling.

The early language arts curriculum should also include basic writing skills. At this age, there is little need to concentrate on anything other than how to hold a pencil and how to shape letters and numbers and, for the thoroughly modern child, the location of each letter on their computer keyboard. The specifics of how to write words, sentences, and paragraphs will come later.

Language Arts for Students in Grades Three Through Five

The language arts curriculum for students in grades three through five builds upon the basic reading and writing skills that students mastered in grades K-2. Journaling, preparing basic book reports, and group discussions all help students to develop writing skills and enhance their reading comprehension. Reading becomes not only a situation of pure story enjoyment, but also encourages students to start thinking about such things as cause and effect, story lines and progression, and story meanings.

There is no better time than the present for educators to begin to use more than basic instructional texts to help students learn to read. As a matter of fact, some educators warn that reading programs that use only developmental reading texts fail to expose early readers to real life books, i.e., literature. Children should indeed be exposed to genuine literature at the earliest possible age, not merely books written primarily to teach reading. It is important to note that the literature that early readers are exposed to is not the same literature that adults read. Early reading literature merely means creative books written by authors who write to entertain, not just teach.

Middle and Upper Grades Language Arts

Students who have successfully mastered the basics of reading and writing in the lower grades are ready to spread their wings and read! Upper grades language arts curriculums emphasize further reading comprehension by requiring readers to tackle increasingly more difficult literature. Students in grades six through eight gain comprehension by analyzing what they've read and participating in critical discussions and writing assignments.

It is really important that every reader, at all levels, find the genre that melds best with their unique interests. Requiring children to read "To Kill a Mocking Bird" when they prefer "Cujo" is nearly guaranteed to destroy their interest in, and love of, reading. Allowing a student at least some freestyle reading is one key to maintaining a child's interest in reading. There will certainly come a time when reading Chaucer might be necessary, but the language arts curriculum should never be so rigid as to require only one source of literature over all others.

More information on the teaching of reading and language arts instruction can be found by visiting the National Council of Teachers of English website at www.ncte.org.

Michael Levy has published more than 250 articles and books on learning and memory. Recently, he developed Reading Buddy 2.0 to teach children to learn to read English using a remarkably easy and effective syllabics method. Would you like a free copy of this innovative computer program to teach your child to read using this modern method? Claim your free copy of Reading Buddy 2.0.

Language Arts Graphic Organizers are tools which can help an author choose a subject and gather their details before the writing begins and also during the whole writing process. They can be used as a strategy for teaching writing to help identify possible subjects, learn as much as possible about the subject, decide on an interesting point to expand upon and list factors which can be included and as a tool to design and organize the writing. They are wonderful tools for young writers and helpful in teaching children to write well.

The writing process often follows these steps:

• Pre-writing;
• Writing the first draft;
• Revising;
• Editing and Proofreading.

Language Arts graphic organizers will be most useful in the pre-writing stage, but can also be aids when writing the draft and when revising to help the writer clarify and logically present their work.

What are some language arts graphic organizers and when can they be used?

Initially, when deciding upon a topic, these graphic organizers can be used:

• Clustering - Begin with a nucleus word related to a writing topic and cluster words around it. Begin with the word in a circle in the center of the page and then branch off it with lines joining to new words. These in turn can branch off to other related words. This helps to identify a subtopic within a larger topic. You will also begin to see which subtopic you know most about and which topics will need more research if you were to write on that topic.
• Listing - Do the same as above, but just list words related to the main topic

Graphic Organizers which will help the writer gather details, revise and rewrite are:

• Clustering - Can once again be useful to help you narrow down your topic.
• 5 W's and H - Once you have selected your topic, ask Who? What? When? Where? and Why? and How? This graphic organizer can have the main topic in the center of the page with each W? spidering from the center. It could look like the spokes of a wheel.
• Describing Wheel - This graphic organizer is like a large wheel with the topic in the center. The circle is divided into five sectors - one for each of the senses. This graphic organizer helps the author think of ways to describe a topic, a person, a place, an object according to each sense : sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing.
• Story Map - This can be useful for narrative writing. This can be organized in horizontal steps. The Setting - which describes who, what, where, when; The Problem or Conflict ; The Plot which includes the rising action and may include a number of sub-plots; The Climax; The Falling Action and Resolution;
• Compare and Contrast - This graphic organizer can be set up as a T on a page and useful to compare and contrast topics, events, people and so on.
• Venn Diagram - A Venn Diagram is also a useful graphic organizer which compares and contrasts two subjects.
• Timeline - A timeline can be useful to list an order of events in a person's life, an event,
• A Process Diagram - This graphic organizer is useful to list details of how a process works or step by step instructions. Processes can be joined by arrows.
• Cycle Diagram - In much the same way as above, this graphic organizer can be used to describe a process which continues as a cycle - science related subjects - life-cycles, water-cycle etc.
• Cause/ Effect Organizer - This is another T chart which can describe results which come from a particular event.
• Definition Diagram - Using a spiral diagram, information on the subject can be written on the spokes. A topic can be defined by a quote, a dictionary definition, important facts, personal definitions, What it is not, An example of it.
• KWL - Another graphic organizer which helps the author see the gaps in his/her knowledge of a subject and a way to fill it: It is presented as a 3 column chart with these headings :
  • What do I know? (K);
  • What do I want to Know? (W)
  • What I learned (L) or still want to know.
• Main Idea/Supporting Ideas - This chart can be useful to draft an essay or paragraph. The topic sentence or thesis statement is written at the top and listed underneath are the supporting statements, quotes, facts, examples which support the thesis. An essay may contain a few paragraphs which need supporting evidence for each thesis statement.

These tools are useful to any author, any child or adult, who likes to have a visual and graphic overview of their writing and likes to express their thoughts spatially.

Teaching kids to write is one of the biggest challenges that a homeschooler faces. Just how do we get those little guys to wax eloquently on paper? Doesn't it make your hair bristle when they groan, "Ah, Mom, I hate writing!"

We try everything to make it work. Don't we make them fill the page? Don't we circle every error, correct every misspelled word, harp about their grammar? What more can we do? Unfortunately, sometimes we do too much. Let's consider the following example to illustrate what I mean.

Yanking the garment from your hand, the toddler says, "Me do it! I do it myself." From a young age, children express independence by attempting grown-up tasks. They want to dress themselves, make a sandwich, set the table. We smile at their childish efforts. Colors don't match, the sandwich is sloppy and the table setting haphazard. A wise parent accepts the creation, resisting the urge to fix it. I confess that I wasn't always a wise parent.

How many times have I stepped in to help? "Here, Honey, let Mommy help." That statement is the kiss of death to the child's creativity and independence. When children complete a task with an adult-modified result, they know as well as everyone else that their creativity was lost in the shuffle. Grandma knows when the child carries that perfectly decorated angel food cake to the table while you gush ecstatically, "Just look what Zelda made, all by herself," that there's not a chance that she actually did. Everyone in the room, including Zelda, knows that there's a lot more Mommy in that cake than Zelda, but no one admits it.

Are you seeing the similarity? Now let's apply this principle to teaching children to write. How can we step back and allow them to write without over correcting, modifying, or rewriting--in other words, taking over?

But Dianne, I hear you thinking. How can I teach my children to improve their writing skills? I want them to do their best. Perhaps the child's best is far below your comfortable standard. Perhaps the standard that makes you comfortable is unrealistically high. The worst thing we can do is to do the work for the child.

When a child writes a story, a report or a math test, the end product should look as if a child wrote it. It should sound as if a child wrote it. A child's story with an adult voice begs the obvious question: "How did that happen?" It simply shouldn't sound that polished.

There should be mistakes because children have not yet mastered spelling, grammar, punctuation, word usage and style. If a story pops out of the printer perfectly formatted, paragraphs correct, punctuation flawless from commas to semi-colons, complicated sentence structure and figures of speech lined up like motor homes at a trade show, there's something wrong.

Like Grandma, we all know that there is no way the child produced that piece of work herself. The sad thing is that we broadcast our embarrassment of our children's imperfect work when we clean up all the errors in our desperate attempt to make the writing better. The truth is that it isn't better; it's just altered. By us. What's sadder is that we aren't even doing it to make the child look better. We are mostly concerned with how we look.

In a future article, I will share some more tips on how we can encourage our children to do their best at writing without taking over.

Dianne Dachyshyn is a freelance writer and a motivational speaker who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.  She works as a home education facilitator, helping homeschooling families plan their programs and deal with challenges.  Dianne is passionate about teaching children to write.  Visit her website at HomeschoolWell.com.

What do "Spelling Power" and "Easy Grammar Plus" books consist of and do they work? What good literature, reading and vocabulary programs are out there that will help with comprehension?

Spelling Power is an excellent system for spelling.  It works well for children who have good memories, who can essentially memorize spelling words through writing them and working with them a few times.  It isn't organized by phonetic word families so it is not a spelling approach that works well with children who have weak memories.  It's draw back is the cost, but its good point is that you can have one spelling resource for all the children.

Easy Grammar Plus is by Wanda Phillips.  It is the same material that is in the Easy Grammar workbooks.  Easy Grammar Plus is more expensive because it contains all the material for all the grades in one book. It is organized by parts of speech.  There are worksheets for every topic. There is a student workbook that can be purchased to go along with it. The worksheet format may get a little tiresome after a while.

Grammar is very difficult to retain if it is not integrated into it's most useful format which is "writing". You never really "know" grammar until you become a writer and use it in real life.

If your child is really struggling with reading comprehension, just going over and over more comprehension material will not solve the problem. Reading a paragraph and then answering questions does not really teach comprehension. It tests comprehension. If you need to work with a child specifically on comprehension, I would suggest the LindaMood Bell kit titled Visualizing and Verbalizing. Look for it on the LindaMood Bell website. Another item that is often used in conjunction with this or alone is the Barnell Loft Comprehension Series. There are levels A-H and there is also a separate workbook for each detailed area.  When put together, each of these areas make up the definition of "comprehension". A few examples are: understanding the main idea and making deductions and inferences. You probably would not want to go through every single book, rather test the child and place him directly in the appropriate one for his level.

If you just want a literature section of about one page and then vocabulary from that section and about 4 exercises a week to go with it, I highly recommend Wordly Wise 3000.  This book is not Wordly Wise, which I do not recommend. You will find that the Wordly Wise 3000 books begin at about the sixth grade level and have an excellent literature selection in each unit. The positive aspect is that it is inexpensive, approximately $7, the negative aspect is that it is a workbook approach. But it is very well written.

EPS publishes quite a few styles of Vocabulary Workbooks.  The format is different for each style.  The words in each book are chosen according to different criteria.

For example: Vocabulary from the Classical Roots chooses words based on the Latin root.  It begins with roots such as unus and bi. Then you study words such as Universal, and Bicycle which relate back to the root.  This is a very good way to remember and relate vocabulary words and other words you had not previously encountered.

Wordly Wise 3000 is a literature based vocabulary book.  You read a literature selection and learn the vocabulary words from the context of the story. This is a very good method for children who not only need extra reading practice, but who are also helped by getting knowledge in context.

The heavy use of riddles, crossword puzzles and hidden messages makes Wordly Wise more difficult to use. Although Worldly Wise 3000 also has puzzles, I believe they have been used more judiciously. The way the words are presented in Wordly Wise is also a little less clear. The words are presented in multiple forms ie. as nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. This makes it a little more difficult.  It's not that Wordly Wise is a "bad" vocabulary book, its just that it is not as user friendly and does not teach the words in as usable a format as does Vocabulary for the Classical Roots or Wordly Wise 3000. Think of Wordly Wise 3000 as the new and improved Wordly Wise.

Word lists may more clearly illustrate the point.  Below, I've detailed 3 lists from EPS vocabulary books. EPS also publishes other vocabulary books which we are not considering here.

• Vocabulary from the Classical Roots: monarch, monogram, monolith, monologue, monopoly, unanimous, unilateral, duplex, duplicate, bisect, bilateral, bipartisan  (These word meanings are more easily remembered because they are tied together by their common roots of mono, unus, duo, and bi.)

• Wordly Wise 3000:  affect, calculate, climate, column, decay, exceed, forbid, grove, limb, mammoth, mature, permit, resist, scorch, tower. (These words are more easily understood because they are tied together by a narrative selection about Redwood Trees)

• Wordly Wise: assail, assimilate, charitable, deposit, emulate, fallow, foil, hogshead, mishap, morose, ostentatious, patriot, skein, spurn, touchy, tremor.  (These words do not tie together in any noticeable way, except they are vocabulary useful in a variety of verbal contexts.)

Hope this clarifies it.