I have two kids I will be homeschooling next year.
I have a 6th grader who will be homeschooling for the first time (he’s been in public school, and has in the past, come home in tears about daily quick writes. Just had a horrible time coming up with ideas. Lately it’s been the amount of sentences required he struggled with. He’s a bit of a perfectionist…with everything. He used to fret the same way about art…even just coloring, until I told him there’s no wrong way to color and than he broke out and started coloring these elaborate designs (I was amazed at the change…like the creativity was in there, but he just needed the freedom from worrying about “doing it right” before he could express it). So, while I think he’ll be pretty comfortable with grammar exercises, I don’t want that to be too much of the focus cause that’s what he’ll obsess about when he’s doing free writing. He actually comes up with a not bad finished product…like his sentence structure and such seems fine, and he uses good vocabulary. But coming up with material is hard for him. And he’s returning to school after this year of homeschool, so I want to help him with the type of “quick on the spot” writing he’ll have to do there.
I’m a creative type myself…in fact, I studied to be an English teacher before I crashed and burned due to lack of organization, poor classroom discipline, and pure fatigue. But also I don’t feel I was well prepared. I know well how to edit what they’ve already written and show them ways to improve their writing (even helped writer friends with their work), but when it comes to helping people learn how to fill that blank page to begin with, I am stumped, because at least with creative writing I never struggled with that, and with other forms of writing, I don’t remember the process…now it just comes to me).
My other homeschooled son is age 8, but at about a 1st grade level…in some ways more at a KG level and in others starting to approach 2nd. He does not struggle with coming up with ideas…at least for creative writing. He is full of imagination. But the actual writing and the grammar (knowing the difference between a sentence, and not a sentence, for instance) is where he struggles. He loves telling a story, but hates writing down anything. He doesn’t like writing about his real life experiences as much, though sometimes I can get him to draw them. Really, getting more than a sentence of writing he did himself has been near impossible.
I’m looking for writing curriculum for both really. Maybe not the same one for both though. It would be nice though if they could be the same topics at least some of the time, taught at different levels with different expectations of the final product.