Writing ideas. Writing prompts. Writing suggestions.
These are the things that cause children who do not know *how* to write to hate writing.
And it is often what we do to kids in an effort to get the writing. But they do not work for these kinds of kids.
So what works?
We had some definite advantages to raising children and homeschooling during “the stone age”! 🙂 For one thing, we didn’t have many choices of activities, so it was much easier to stay home and build good study habits, household work schedules, and family time. (Obviously, it can still be done today, but we were forced to stay home more in general.) Secondly, we were blissfully unaware of the demanding academics of today. We didn’t know that our kids needed to know everything that is now required to graduate and go to college. We didn’t do labs, advanced math, and other more strenuous academic pursuits with our first born at all. (I’m not saying this was good–I’m just saying it gave us more of a precious commodity that everyone longs for today–time.)
Crossword puzzles. Hidden words. Fill-in-the-blanks. Join-two-or-three-parts-of-words-together (not always at syllable breaks..agghh….). Graph paper practice. Circle the correct spelling. Highlight the word families. Syllabication. All viable spelling word practices. Some work. Some don’t. Some work for some kids but not for others. Enter my Six S Spelling Secret Packet–the technique that is used weekly in my Character Quality Language Arts program–and that brick and mortar and homeschool teachers are using weekly thanks to our new downloadable products!
A Christmas Carol, Gift of the Magi, If You’re Missing Baby Jesus, The Christmas Tapestry, The Burglar’s Christmas, The Birth, The Luke Chronicles, Cosmic Christmas.….these are just a few of our favorite “young teens and up” stories that we read or listen to at Christmas. Just because our kids are all over twelve doesn’t mean we have to stop reading aloud at Christmas time. (As a matter of fact, we still read a favorite Christmas short story on our family decorating night and another one on our family Christmas Eve—with twelve adult kids!)
Welcome to another Punctuation Puzzle! Yep… a puzzle that you solve by putting in the correct punctuation and words/usage fixes– along with explanations and answers about each error! Perfect for students and teachers alike!
Today’s Puzzle is about Homophones and Parentheses… and it uses an interesting sentence from one of our Write-For-A-Month/Write On Books about Mulan.
by Zac Kieser & Donna Reish
..
