by Donna | Sep 13, 2018
One of the great things about teaching children in a homeschool or one-on-one setting is that we can easily see when readiness simply isn’t there. And one of the greatest benefits is that we can wait for the child’s readiness to be there before moving on. (Sweet babies…let’s be patient with them!)
Patience is often hard for a homeschooling mom. We are prone to comparisons. We are prone to worry. We are prone to low self confidence when our kids aren’t learning quickly.
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by Donna | Jul 2, 2018
Welcome, English Teachers!
I won’t tell you how many weeks it is til school starts for our “Half-Day Homeschool” or our “Cottage Classes, but we all know how fast summer goes by! I hope you are enjoying your summer break–and getting some good school planning in here and there. To help with the latter, I would like to gift you my Think Fast Grammar Quiz book with detailed answer keys!
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by Donna | Jan 15, 2018
Welcome to another Wondering Wednesday A/V. Today’s episode is a V—video!
In this video, I show parents how to use our new “Consequence Pies” ebook/download (one of last month’s freebies!). However, if you do not have the Consequence Pies product, stay with me!
The methodology in this download (available here at our store) can be used with or without the product, and I explain that protocol in this video! (Plus, you could make your own pies easily after watching the video.)
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by Donna | Dec 6, 2017
Which came first–the chicken or the egg? Or which comes first–the body or the opening paragraph? I have some strong opinions about this that I answer in today’s blog video/live class! 🙂 Additionally, this post contains a video lesson on creating opening and closing paragraphs for research reports. I teach my students (and I use this approach in my books) that there are over a dozen ways to create an opening paragraph. (See idea list below.) I also teach them that in upper level writing, they should be very specific in their opening and closing paragraphs. No more summarizing here and there (or restating everything you say in the paper!). I teach them HOW to write the various opening and closing types so that they can use them in their writing. Watch today’s video and follow along with a few pages of the text we used. (Jump Start II–coming out this month!)
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by Donna | Jan 28, 2017
My Meaningful Composition co-author (my oldest child Joshua) and I have been writing a novel for, um, four years now. Well, truth be told, he has been writing it for nearly twenty years as he started outlining it when he was eighteen years old. It is finished actually, but Joshua is a perfectionist (at teaching, instructional writing, lesson plan preparation, and novel writing), so it isn’t finished in his eyes. We recently got it back out, dusted it off, and dug in to find his perfect spot again (and add in more technology…do you know how much things change in our world in four years?).
I have written seventy-five books in the past fifteen years—averaging 800 pages a book. The first forty were completely new books, and the next thirty-five have been re-writes and new books taken out of the original forty (i.e. half of the MC lessons came out of Character Quality Language Arts, for instance). But it has been a long journey nonetheless.
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by Donna | Nov 5, 2016
Click to watch!
I have loved teaching reading again! And I have loved creating products to use for letter recognition and sounds/letter recognition. It is so fun to work with younger children again…and makes me anxious to teach my grandkids to read (or help teach them!).
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