With the addition of live video Cottage Classes to our line up next year and the completion of the Meaningful Composition and Write On writing series recently, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my books.

Technically, my books can be broken down into four categories:

1) Complete language arts for second through twelfth grade Christian homeschooling families and Christian schools–Character Quality Language Arts (CQLA). Twelve print books of 1200 to 1600 pages each (worktexts). We use these in our full language arts Cottage Classes.

2) Composition/writing only for second through twelfth grade Christian homeschooling families and Christian schools–Meaningful Composition (MC). Twenty-two print books of 350 to 500 pages each (worktexts). We use these in our writing/composition Cottage Classes.

3) Write On! (based on books/movies)…Mowgli, Peter Pan, Beauty and Beast for second through twelfth grade homeschoolers, Christian schools, and public schools. Fifteen books available in print and downloadable formats. These are also worktexts. We have been testing these in our Cottage Classes as well (and many of these projects are also in MC books).

4) Downloadable products–little by little we are getting my lessons, concepts, and approaches up at our store, Teachers Pay Teachers, and CurrClick. These include how to use our Checklist Challenge, how to memorize prepositions, short writing projects of one week each, coloring books/readers, preschool and kindergarten letters and sounds program, and much more.

I’ve explained these further in the Facebook Live video below!

Check out the samples, books, and even videos of many of these products!

CQLA

Character Quality Language Arts–click on the image below for free one month samples!

Meaningful Composition (2 week samples!)

BookMovieBook Series (free samples at store!)

Language arts and reading books based off of the Jungle Book, Peter Pan, and Beauty & the Beast movies!

Other Downloadable Products

More language arts, character training & organizational tools!

More helpful reading:

Watch me teach how to write research reports here.

Writing With Adjectives (Facebook Live video lesson)

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Three ways to order!

Email us at characterink@gmail.com

Call us at 260-450-7063

Visit our Character Ink Press Store!

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1. Meaningful Composition uses my Directed Writing Approach!

In my Directed Writing Approach, every detail of every project is laid out for your student. None of my writing projects are “writing ideas” or “writing prompts.” Every writing assignment contains step-by-step instructions with much hand-holding along the way. The student is “directed” in how to write and what to write at all times—from brainstorming to research to outlining to rough draft and finally to revising.

My Directed Writing Approach takes the best methods I have discovered in order to teach each type of writing—color-coded research for research-based projects, “Topic of Paragraph” commitment for teaching paragraph breaks, The Three P’s of Persuasion for persuasive writing, the “section-paragraph-sentence” method for longer papers, story writing mapping, Paragraph House for young writers, 1-3-1 essay outlines, my Checklist Challenge for revising, and much more. Each Directed Writing Approach “method” is tried and true after fifteen years of my writing fifty books and over forty thousand pages!

2. MC contains a combination of projects—those with “given material” to write from and those that are completely original (in which student finds material on his own to use as his source).

Students are taught a wide variety of outlining methods in all of my books—Key Word Outlines From Given Material, Directed Brainstorming, Persuasive Mapping, The Paragraph House Outline, Split Paper Technique, Sentence-by-Sentence (S-by-S) Outlining from original sources, Q and A Outlines, Five W’s outlines, Scene Outlines for Story Writing, Formal Outlines for research, and much more.

I teach most writing types/projects by giving the student source material to take notes from first—then having the student branch out and write that same type of writing finding his own source. It is this combination of “given material” first followed by student-found material that gives the student confidence to write that type of paper or story. This method keeps the student from becoming too dependent upon given source material while at the same time helping him learn to find source material (or create his own!) after using given passages first. It is a win-win method.

3. The skills that are needed for each writing project are taught within that writing project.

To ask a student to write a paper using three sources and two quotations without teaching the student the skills to complete those steps is cruel! When a project is being taught in MC (and all of my books), I also teach the student whatever skills are needed to complete the project.

For example, if the student is writing a story about an animal escaping, he will be taught words and vocabulary that describe various sizes and types of animals as well as how to use onomatopoeia to describe animal sounds. If a student is told to write a persuasive paper, he will be taught the elements of persuasive writing first. If he is writing a research report in which quotes are to be cited, he will be instructed first in how to use quotations (in an earlier lesson) then in how to cite them for that particular paper. These many Write On! lessons give students the tools to write whatever they are assigned easily and with confidence.

4. Books are tested with over one hundred students each semester!

My books are not written by grammarians behind closed doors or even by experts who seldom work in small groups with students. (While my undergraduate degree in elementary education and my master’s work in reading specialist do help me occasionally, it is homeschooling for thirty years and testing my books every year {and writing and rewriting!} that give me my writing credentials.)

MC books are written by teachers who write meaningful lessons then take them out and test drive them for two to five years with over a hundred students each semester. (My new 10 II: Four Research Reports has been tested for six years now—and took over a hundred hours to write and perfect the MLA/quotation citation methods alone!)

Every year Character Ink has local cottage classes for homeschooled students in which small groups of students (six to ten per class) take either our complete language arts (Character Quality Language Arts) or our composition-only (Meaningful Composition) classes. As we test our books, we make notes in the margins, discuss them with our students (why was this one so hard for you when the last one was easier?), talk among the teachers, then go back and fix the books, tweak the lessons, and even drop lessons that are too confusing or uninteresting to students. You can’t possibly know if a lesson or project is a good one until you have sat across the table from eight junior high boys to watch their expressions (and/or glossed over looks in their eyes!). This is how we know MC works!

5. Student writing samples are provided for all original writing projects and portions of samples are provided for smaller assignments.

Our books have a little extra something that is seldom found in textbooks and certainly never found at the level of ours—student samples! Each of the original projects have a full-length student sample of that project. As a matter of fact, we use the student samples in our books to teach from—starting with Thesis Statements, Thesis Statements “Reloaded,” and other LINK sentences on to paragraph breaks, proper quotation use, scene development in stories, and much more.

Students understand the writing project so much better when there are models for them to look at and when they see what the expectations are for the project. Parents love our student samples because it helps them measure their student’s skills in following the instructions for each project (and gives the parent confidence to know if her student is completing the assignment correctly).

Our student writing samples are provided in all types of projects—expository essays, biographical reports, research reports, short stories, piggyback stories, persuasive essays, and more. Your student will know from the beginning what each project involves as MC takes him through a sample to see what great project he will be doing! Student samples are invaluable!

Need further evidence? Go here and print off two weeks of free Meaningful Composition samples at each level! Try before you buy! You will be amazed at how quickly your students become accomplished writers—and how pain-free teaching writing really can be!  🙂

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Ray & Donna Reish

We are available to speak on a variety of topics including Christian parenting, marriage, homeschooling, organization, prioritizing, heart training, raising teens, language arts teaching, writing instruction, scheduling, home management, and more. Additionally, Joshua (our oldest son, age 31, BA in history with emphases on literature, writing, and government) speaks to parents about how to teach literature, creative writing, social sciences, speech, debate, history, and more.

Character Ink has dozens of workshop possibilities for your event! And we love to help families. Win-Win!

Check out the links below to find out the details of our homeschooling workshops, weekend seminars, and parenting sessions.

You will find the following and much more!

1. Donna, author of fifty language arts and writing curricula for two publishers, has dozens of workshops on homeschooling; home management; teaching  reading, writing, and language arts; heart training and relationship building with tweens and teens; child training of babies, toddlers, and preschoolers; and much more.

2. Ray and Donna together teach about homeschooling, home management, teens, tweens, character training, marriage, prioritizing, and more.

3. Joshua teaches about history, language arts, literature, writing, speech, debate, and more!

Joshua Reish

4. Donna and/or Joshua do all day or weekend writing workshops for parents and/or students; SAT/ACT/Timed Essay workshops; general language arts instruction all day seminar, The Almost Three R’s workshop (Donna); and more.

5. Ray and Joshua do speech and debate workshops and training

6. Ray and Donna do an entire weekend seminar for Christian parents entitled “Raising Kids With Character,” in addition to follow up or stand-alone workshops on character training and heart training of tweens and teens.

 We’ve put a page together of a complete list of the speaking topics and seminars…read more about any of the topics you are interested in!   Click HERE to check it out!

Contact Info:

Please feel free to call or email with more questions or if you have a need for our workshops.

Call us: (260) 450-7063 or (260) 433-4365.

Email us: characterink@gmail.com

Or drop us a  message on our Contact page.

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What Is CQLA?

Character Quality Language Arts, CQLA for short, is a language arts program that brings together all aspects of language arts (except for learning to read in lower grades and detailed, individual literature book studies in upper grades) in one place for students in grades two through twelve. It has all aspects of language arts woven throughout each weekly lesson, including copy work, vocabulary comprehension, spelling, editing, outlining, writing, grammar, usage, structural analysis, word studies, editing via checklists, dictation, and more. it is an all-in-one program that was written when author, Donna Reish, decided that each of the separate books her kids were using (spelling, vocabulary, grammar, editing, writing, etc.) should all be put into one program with all aspects of language arts flowing together instead of taught in a disjointed manner from multiple texts.

Each CQLA book is laid out the same with weekly lessons broken down by monthly character quality emphasis. Each book is a work text (which is why they are so long!) meaning that most assignments are done right in the book (except for writing reports). (All assignments are done in the book for Pre A students.)

CQLA is character and biblically-based. Scripture and biblical principles abound. All passages, topics, grammar sentences, etc., come from historical, biblical, nature, health, character, etc., materials that emphasize certain character qualities. (For example, a passage about George Washington Carver emphasizes determination; one about a sloth emphasizes laziness vs. diligence; one about Macchu Picchu emphasizes resourcefulness, etc.)

All types of writing are taught—beginning with writing from passages that we give to students each week for the first two weeks of each unit and then writing from material the student finds (or “from his heart or his head”—depending on whether it is a report, essay, or story) for the last two weeks of each unit. All writing projects utilize our Directed Writing Approach in which students are directed each step of the way in the writing process—and taught all of the pre-writing skills that are needed in order to complete that type of writing. For example, in research report writing, the student is taught ahead of time how to research, how to merge sources (via our Color-Coded Research method), how to divide up material into paragraphs, etc. In essay writing, the student is taught how to write quotations, how to use transition sentences and phrases, etc. In story writing, the student is taught via Directed Brainstorming how to develop goals, obstacles, and resolution. Nothing is left to chance—our writing lessons are not writing ideas! (Note that the same writing assignments found in CQLA are also found in our composition-only books, Meaningful Composition.)

To see samples and descriptions for each of the books, be sure to check out this page HERE!

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Donna Reish, of Character Ink Publishing of Raising Kids With Character parenting seminar and blog, answers a reader’s questions about Character Ink’s  (formerly Training for Triumph’s) cottage classes for homeschoolers. Donna shares about their complete language arts programs, writing classes, social sciences for high school, science classes with labs, speech and debate, and more. She also introduces their video classes for the fall of 2015.

Subscribe to our Wondering Wednesday podcasts in iTunes.

Check out our class offerings/schedules for Cottage Classes for Spring 2015 by clicking here.

Check back in April to find our offerings and registration forms for Fall 2015!

Call, text,  or email with questions about our classes: 513-288-0891 or 260-450-7063 or 260-433-4365. Email characterink@gmail.com   characterinklady@gmail.com

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image from wordmr.

If you have a newer edition of CQLA, you likely have weekly quizzes called “Think Fast Grammar Quiz.” When we created these, we originally thought that parents would use the Grammar Cards (available in Level B and C books and in the Teacher’s Guide) to grade their students’ quizzes.

Then we began teaching/testing the editions that contain these quizzes and discovered that it wasn’t as easy as we had previously thought to just use the Grammar Cards to check the quizzes–and to help your student categorize and study the grammar words.

So we created the document below to be used both as an Answer Key as well as a study guide for the Think Fast Grammar Quiz. It will be in a future edition of the Teacher’s Guide, and when our new website is done this fall, it will be available there as well. In the meantime, we are emailing the document to anyone who calls or emails us asking for it–and we are putting it here at the blog in the hopes that word will get out and parents will find it.

We use it to grade our testing students’ quizzes, but we also use it in the following way:

1. We have the student fill in as much of each part of the quiz as he or she can—then highlight the line in which he left off on his own. Then we have him look in the AK to find more and finish filling in the lines with the ones from the AK. This shows us what he already knows and what he had to look up, but it also helps him to learn more of them by writing them out as he looks them up in the AK.

2. We also assign portions of the AK for homework. For example, we will have all students study the section in the AK that has opposite prepositions or prepositions that begin with B, etc. This makes the AK into a sort of Study Guide for the student and has really helped them learn the words in categories as opposed to long lists of them.

Please share this post with fellow CQLA users so that we can get the word out that there is a lengthy, detailed, helpful Answer Key for the Think Fast Grammar Quiz! 😉

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9s1gDz0XKhwVW9YcDRpSHpHZU0/edit?usp=sharing

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