writing

A Challenge for Your Young Writer: Homeschooling NaNoWriMo

October 2, 2018 by Jenna

Are you training up a young writer? Or do you want to switch up your writing instruction for a while? You might consider homeschooling NaNoWriMo this year. NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, a special opportunity for writers to join a yearly writing competition in November. Many writers struggle with finishing a story because they get stuck editing and re-editing without moving on. Participants are encouraged to leave editing behind and just write. Participating adults must write 50,000 words from November 1 to November 30 at midnight, but children may enter the Young Writer’s Program and set their own word count goals.

How can NaNoWriMo fit into your homeschool?

The BJU Press Writing & Grammar program is excellent for building writing skills and grammatical accuracy, but there’s a difference between testing that knowledge in a graded assignment and letting it loose in novel form. As your budding writer lets her imagination loose on paper, she becomes closely aware of the joys of writing. She’ll also get a sense of accomplishment from reaching her word count, whether she has a goal of 50,000 or 20,000.

But you don’t have to stress about fitting another lengthy learning activity into your homeschool schedule. Though 50,000 words in 30 days averages out to almost 2,000 words a day, as a fiction writer myself, I can tell you that it’s a lot easier to write 2,000 words in a fictional piece than in a literary essay. And since you homeschool, you can put your normal English coursework on hold for the month. Or you can even count the writing your child does towards her final grade in English!

How does NaNoWriMo work?

If you’d like your child to participate in the competition, she may sign up for an account at NaNoWriMo.org, or you may help her sign up for the Young Writer’s Program. Once you’ve set up a profile, your child can create a novel, and starting November 1, she can log how many words she writes each day on the site. If your child finishes 50,000 words by 11:59 pm on November 30, or meets another word goal, you can paste the full text of her novel on the website for a chance to win.

Or if you don’t want to officially participate in the competition, you can follow the rules without creating an account. Perhaps completing the word goal could mean a special dinner or a night out?

How do you prepare for homeschooling NaNoWriMo?

Some participants like to start on November 1 with a brand new novel concept with no development. But if your child wants to participate in NaNoWriMo, she doesn’t have to start from scratch. Here are a few things you can do to prepare.

Review the writing process with her. Since the goal is writing a whole novel in 30 days, she will spend most of her time drafting. She won’t be able to spend much time at all in the revising, proofreading, and publishing steps. You might consider saving her novel to go back over in the future in order to complete these steps.
Gather story prompts and share them with her. She can choose a story idea now so that she can start deciding on basic plot details.
Get a head start on planning. Since the month of November is dedicated to the drafting portion of the writing process, your child can spend the weeks leading up to it on planning. She can work on an outline or fill in a plot pyramid for the major events of her story.
Practice techniques for busting writer’s block with her. What stops her while she’s writing? Find ways to help her move past those blocks so she knows how to handle them in November.

NaNoWriMo may seem like a daunting task, but in the end, your young writer will have something a lot of other aspiring writers don’t—a start. And with writing, any start is a good start. After meeting her word goal, your young writer will have a better idea of her own writing abilities and potential. Will she decide to take the piece she’s written to the next level? Or will she yearn to complete a bigger goal?

6 Ways to Combat the Blank Page

August 29, 2017 by Jenna

Your homeschool year is about to get underway again, and with it, exciting new writing assignments. Whether your writer looks forward to learning more about writing or tries to stay as far away from it as he can, there’s one aspect of writing that he will most likely struggle with.

The blank page.

Looking at the whiteness of a computer document or the empty lines of a notebook page can be overwhelming, as if the blank page asks “Where do you even start?” How do you teach your writer to overcome his blank pages? Here are some tips for encouraging elementary and secondary students to conquer one of the most daunting phases of a writing assignment.

Elementary Writing Assignments

1. Take dictation.

A young writer often has more to overcome than just the blank page itself. He may get hung up on vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, and even handwriting. You can bypass much of his hesitation by having him explain what he wants to write about and writing his explanation down for him. From there, he can revise what you wrote until it matches the assignment’s requirements.

2. Add a visual goal.

In English 2, the textbook explains how to write a paragraph by laying out the various parts of a paragraph and underlining those parts in different colors—green for the topic sentence, orange for details, and red for the ending. By highlighting blank lines in these colors and having your young writer write in the missing parts, you can give him visual cues and goals to work toward. The different colors break up the blankness into manageable pieces.

3. Use writing prompts.

One of the simplest ways to overcome the blank page is to never let it be completely blank. You can give your writer a prompt to put at the top of his page. The prompt you give can be the first sentence of a story, a topic sentence for a paragraph, or even a question for him to answer. This works the same way as the “Apply and Write” sections in BJU Press elementary English textbooks.

Secondary Writing Assignments

1. Fill in the outline.

Papers for secondary writers often involve writing outlines. Your writer can skip the blank page entirely simply by expanding directly from his outline. Even a simple outline will give him something to work with.

2. Keep the thesis at the top.

Almost every secondary paper will involve a thesis of some kind—a thesis gives the writer’s point of view for the paper. Even a simple paragraph essay is often based on one. Once your writer has decided on a thesis, have him write it at the top of each page. Keeping it there will help him focus on his purpose as well as eliminate the blank page.

3. Take a walk.

Sometimes, if your writer really gets stuck, getting him away from the accusing stare of the blank page can be the perfect cure. Once his legs fall into the regular rhythm of walking, his mind will be free to come up with the words that will best begin his writing project—provided that he remembers them long enough to write them down.

Other times, overcoming the blank page is a simple matter of putting down words—any words. The words your writer chooses may be changed many times in the drafting process, and that’s OK. Their real function is to get him over that first hurdle so he can write the rest of the paper. The page only stays blank as long as there are no words on it.

Writing and Grammar—Two Halves of One Whole

November 8, 2016 by Jenna

For a busy parent, with everything that has to be completed in one homeschool day, teaching writing and grammar is a lot of work. It might seem to make more sense for you to handle these two related subjects as separate classes, or to spend one semester on grammar and the next on writing. So why does BJU Press put them together in the curriculum? Because writing and grammar are two halves of the same whole. Studying grammar helps your child become a better writer, while studying writing helps your child understand grammar. Here are a few reasons why.

Writing Skills and Grammar Skills

Writing assignments give your child a place to apply the grammar skills he’s just learned. It’s easy for a student to recognize and fix a problem he’s just learned about when looking at a list of sentences that follow a certain formula. The real test of understanding is expecting him to recognize and correct the problem in his own writing. But the reverse is also true—grammar skills improve writing. Writers need a certain level of grammatical understanding in order to be able to communicate effectively. For example, punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence entirely, as in the old joke about the trigger-happy panda that “eats, shoots and leaves.”

Analytical and Conceptual

People tend to be either analytical or conceptual. Grammar is an analytical skill, and children who favor logical processes tend to do well with grammar. On the other hand, writing is highly conceptual. There are fewer hard-and-fast rules for writing, and children who tend to be conceptual thinkers are likely to succeed in writing. Studying writing and grammar together gives both kinds of thinkers opportunities to use their strengths and improve their weaknesses.

Objective and Subjective

Since writing is so conceptual, it can also be frustratingly subjective to assess, but this subjectivity leaves room for leniency in grading. When I was teaching writing, I would often ask myself whether lack of sentence variety or overuse of weak verbs really deserved a lower grade even though everything else was well done. But you know your own child’s strengths and weaknesses. If your child enjoys writing but doesn’t excel at spelling or grammar (the objective part), you can choose to value the writing section (the subjective part) of the rubric over the grammar section. If your child does well grammatically but doesn’t write as well, then you can choose to emphasize the grammar section of the rubric. This gives you the flexibility to evaluate your child based on his strengths rather than his weaknesses.

At BJU Press, we teach writing and grammar together all the way from grade 2 through grade 12. Check out our whole line of English-Writing and Grammar textbooks!

A Hands-on Approach to the Planning Stage

September 29, 2016 by Jenna

Helping your children master writing skills presents a challenge when working with different learning styles. When I taught freshman English, my students were allowed to choose their own approach for planning. Some just made lists of questions while others constructed graphic organizers like bubble charts or word webs. They usually found ways to adapt the process to their own learning styles. But I often wondered how I could adapt the planning stage for hands-on learners.

Maybe you’ve asked a similar question. Here’s one way you can help your child get a literal feel for the planning stage.

First, he’ll need a lot of notecards—3×5 cards cut in halves or fourths work best—and a pencil.

We’ll use the comparison-and-contrast essay and the sample brainstorming from chapter 3 of Writing & Grammar 12 as a foundation for this activity. (Example is from Student Worktext, page 64.)

Next, instead of making an ordinary list, have your child write each new idea he has about roller coasters (or whatever other topic he chooses) on a notecard.

Once he has a good number of cards (fifteen to twenty would be a good start), have him sort through his cards, putting all the items of a similar nature together in the same pile. For example, we can categorize items such as height, speed, rough, and smooth from the list above as physical characteristics.

After sorting the cards into piles according to categories, he should label the back of each card according to the category it belongs to.

He may find that one of his ideas can act like a category itself, like kinds of seats with our roller coaster brainstorming. Or he might realize that some ideas don’t fit into any of his categories. Suggest that he spend more time thinking through these cards, just in case there are other ideas that he could connect the loose cards to. If there’s nothing else, let him return to his larger categories.

With a comparison-and-contrast essay, as in our example, your child would need to sort his cards down further into the categories of the two items he’s comparing—in this case, wooden roller coasters and steel roller coasters. In a different kind of essay, these larger categories could represent different major points in the argument and would be separated into sub-points.

From here, your child needs to make sure of the purpose of his essay. If he’s decided to prove that steel roller coasters are more fun than wooden ones, then he should look through his cards to see which of his categories support his position.

Finally, it’s time to organize the cards according to their strength. In writing, we often conclude with the strongest point because information given last is what readers remember best. If he’s decided that his strongest argument rests on a physical characteristic, he should put his cards from that category at the bottom of the stack.

When brainstorming on notecards, it’s easy for your child to handle the information in a more literal sense. He can rearrange and recategorize his ideas as he needs to, without the hassle and mess of crossing out and erasing. He can also add additional notes or pictures to his cards, or whatever helps him manipulate the information.

All our Writing & Grammar textbooks include detailed explanations for the planning stage of each writing assignment, and many of them have varying suggestions for different kinds of learners. Check out our complete line here!

Teaching Grammar the “Write” Way

September 20, 2016 by BJU Press Writer

Do your children dread the part of the day devoted to writing and grammar? Maybe they have trouble seeing the correlation between grammar and good writing, or maybe they view grammar as boring, impractical, and repetitive. Before college, I felt the same way. So how did I end up with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English? It all started with a different approach to the subject.

English was my least favorite subject in high school. It was hour after hour of workbooks, rules, and more exceptions than rules. Once I turned in a short story that I had spent hours writing and was disappointed in my grade, not because it wasn’t higher but because it was based solely on the fact that I hadn’t made many spelling errors. In contrast to the drudgery of English, math class was exciting, fun, and challenging.

I left for college excited about being a math major. Reluctantly, I also signed up for the first of three required college English classes. In that class, I began learning some new things. I found out that I could arrange paragraphs in a way that made my argument more convincing. I realized that I could replace linking verbs with action verbs to give my essay strength and vitality. I caught on that writing poetry was more than just finding words that rhymed. My papers were graded on content as well as spelling. I started to love English, and I discovered that I was actually more competent in that area than in mathematics.

Maybe your children share my pre-college feelings about writing and grammar. But the good news is that by using two helpful teaching methods, induction and integration, you can interest your children in English and improve their long-term comprehension of grammar.

Induction

Deduction starts with a general rule, from which you make specific applications. For example, you can give your child a list of auxiliaries (helping verbs) and tell him that be, have, and do can also be used as main verbs; then he can underline all the auxiliaries in an exercise.

Induction, on the other hand, is examining specifics and then creating a general rule. To teach inductively, you would give your child several sample sentences with verbs and auxiliaries and then let him generate his own list of auxiliaries. Using this list, he would determine which auxiliaries could also be used as main verbs. Induction allows children the opportunity to investigate or discover something themselves, stimulating their curiosity and their eagerness to learn more.

Integration

To give the facts of grammar a real-life context, integrate your grammar lessons with writing, vocabulary, literature, and speech. Your child could compose a piece of writing and then revise it, changing the passive-voice verbs to active voice and noting the difference in tone. Ask your child to explain why some sentences should remain passive and why others sound better in active voice.

Maybe your child does not like grammar, or maybe he learns quickly and becomes bored. With inductive activities and creative writing assignments, you can spark interest and improve long-term comprehension. Remember that language is a gift from God, unique to beings created in His image, so it’s important to understand it and use it well. Using a fresh approach to grammar might even reveal some hidden talents. Who knows? Your reluctant grammar student could turn out to be an English major or a writer someday.

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Written by Dana G.