After that much-too-long intro, I will write this post about what we are doing for writing this year. I've found that our most enjoyable and effective lessons in just about anything occur when we can work together and talk about things as opposed to simply doing an assignment alone. We do have some subjects that the kids pretty much do alone with me doing short one-on-one lessons and answering questions when needed, such as math and Latin. But this year, writing and literature (and religious studies) have become group activities here.
I mention literature even though I mainly want to talk about writing because I've found that they are so intertwined. We are constantly seeing how studying one helps us with the other.
So, what do we use and what does our schedule look like?
We (the 3 oldest kids, ages 7, 9, and 12) begin our days with literature. I am following Teaching the Classics (found on IEW's site) for this. We spent the first two months going through all the stories in the guide together. Now, discussing things like conflict and theme are pretty easy for us. We also learned about literary devices like alliteration and onomatopoeia, and it's still kind of funny to me when Matteo points these out to me when he sees them in his reading. He really got into it! But, learning about these things helps us realize that authors use them to make their writing interesting, so we can use them at times in our writing, too. After we finished all the stories in the guide, the kids moved on to books of my choosing appropriate to their reading level.
We have also added poetry once a week during our literature time. On Monday mornings, we make hot chocolate to go along with breakfast and extend our breakfast time through our literature time, so we can enjoy sipping on a yummy treat and reading poetry. That gives us something to look forward to on Monday mornings! I just choose poems from different children's anthologies. Lately, we've been reading The Dark Emperor and other Poems of the Night, which has a poem, a beautiful piece of artwork, and a non-fictional prose writing about a nocturnal animal or event on each 2-page spread. This has lead to fun discussions on different ways information can be expressed and why we may use one way instead of another. We also spend some of our poetry time reading through Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry which is a really fun book about how to write poetry with examples of poetry by the author. So, we read some more serious poetry and some fun, silly stuff, too.
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| The girls enjoying hot chocolate during poetry |
Reading poetry regularly has inspired my kids to try writing some of their own. Studying poetry also emphasizes the importance of word choice when writing, which is necessary in prose writing, too, of course.
So, you can see how our literature studies tie into writing in our family.
This post has gotten much longer than I imagined, so I will continue it one another day!
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NaNoWriMo word count update:
Maria: 3621 / 6000
Cati: 1209 / 5000
Matteo: 635 / 1000
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