Wanted: Cowboy Poets
MIDDLE SCHOOL PROMPTS Heifers. Cowpokes. Cottonwoods. Hullabaloo. What do these words have in common? Well, if you were a cowboy poet, you would know! The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering is held in Elko, Nevada, each year. Singers and poets compete, attend workshops,...
When Is a Sweet Pea Not a Sweet Pea?
MIDDLE SCHOOL PROMPTS Gardeners love to receive their new seed catalogs in the middle of winter. It gives them something to dream about and plan for. Not only are the photos of flowers and vegetables beautiful and inspiring but their descriptions are as well. Here's...
Maya Angelou and the Smile
HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS When Maya Angelou, author of the moving autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was eleven years old, she was reunited with her birth mother, whom she hadn’t seen in eight years. Young Maya was unhappy. . After two weeks, her mother still...
3 Best Proofreading Tips for Homeschool Writers
SHARON'S BLOG Proofreading is painful for students. They feel they’re through with the writing process when they write their first draft and then want nothing more to do with that essay. Students tell me that writing the first draft and proofreading it is like writing...
Three Ways to Get Your Children Writing Again
Some kids hate writing essays, and off the top of their heads they can give you 97 reasons why this is so. When I teach my writing course locally, some students are bound to come to the first class with a “don’t even bother trying to teach me” attitude. They believe they are so far gone that they are unteachable.
I disagree.
Do You Have a Spice Clock?
MIDDLE SCHOOL PROMPTS When you want to know what time it is, where do you look? Most likely, you tell time by clocks of some sort. But what if you told time by flowers, birds, or scents? Huh? Jay Griffiths, author of A Sideways Look at Time, writes about the many ways...
Opinion Writing: Professional Matchmakers
SHARON'S BLOG Students who have a hard time writing about wars, politics, gender issues, and other heavy topics really warm up to writing opinions, so let's give them something engaging to write about. After all, everyone has opinions. It's Just Lunch is a dating...
What She Said Surprised Me
SHARON'S BLOG Recently I picked up my order at a local bookstore for a Book-of-the-Month Club I teach. The clerk asked me about the books because it was an unusual number, about thirty. When I explained that I was teaching literature to some homeschool teens, she...
Literature: Why Your Teens Won’t Read It and What You Can Do about It
SHARON'S BLOG Literature might seem like one of those courses in which pulling teeth is involved. You assign a poem, play, short story, or novel to read, and you immediately encounter resistance. It’s hard, they say. It’s boring, they complain. The lawyer in them...
How You Can Help Your Student Be a Better Speller
Andrew Jackson once said that it was a poor mind that could think of only one way to spell a word. By this we know that he was not a homeschool mother who had to grade spelling tests every week.
Do you have a child who seems to defy your every effort to make him a good speller?
Writing tools for all ages!
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