Secular Homeschooling with Blair & Amy

How do you homeschool writing? Just like we homeschool everything else, by giving our kids the tools and scaffolding they need to do it well.

Transcript:

We use an automatic transcription app for our podcast, which makes it possible for us to include transcripts for our podcast episodes — but it does sometimes make weird errors! We do edit it, but I’m sure we miss things sometimes.

Amy: Hello, and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy, brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life I'm, Amy…

Blair: and i'm Blair.

Amy: And today we are talking to you about a topic that is near and dear to our hearts: How to support your homeschooler in becoming a successful strong confident writer. 

[00:00:27] Blair: Oh, this is a hard one you and I’ve been thinking about this for for as long as we've been homeschooling—this was something that I was, I spent a lot of time thinking about, and now we are working on a curriculum that has writing infused all throughout it.

I'm excited to be talking about this today. This is something I know a lot of homeschoolers really struggle with. 

[00:00:51] Amy: Yeah, I think that is true. I think, and I think it's because writing instruction works best when it's at least a little bit explicit. I hear a lot of people in homeschool groups saying that kids are going to learn to write naturally by reading a lot and by writing fun stuff that they like—just turn them loose.

I know that was the curriculum that my mom's first grade students used when she was teaching public school first grade. I'm going to say I think that does work fine for a very small handful of students. I think most of us need a little more support.

I get a lot of students in high school who have done this kind of writing, this kind of interest based, free form writing, and they come to high school, and they're just really not prepared to write the kind of stuff that they need to write.

And so of course that's crushing for their confidence and it's hard for them in their classes. And there are a lot of really easy ways that you can implement writing across all the subjects. So that when your kid gets to high school and college and the rest of their lives, they know what they're doing when someone asks them to write a paragraph or a proposal or a paper.

[00:02:07] Blair: I've been, so for a long time, I've been wanting to incorporate writing instruction into my science courses that I write. And that led me down the rabbit hole of The Writing Revolution, the Hochman method. It was, it's really eye opening when you begin to look at a completely different method.

It is the most common sense approach to teaching writing I've ever seen—ever been exposed to, and it's revolutionary on the one hand, because it is really dramatic. It looks really dramatically different. And on the other hand, you can't believe that everyone isn't using it. And it is that writing should be taught starting at the sentence level and the instruction should be incremental and intentional.

And now that is not the only method that you can use. But if you have a child who is struggling, or if you're struggling to figure out how to teach writing, I highly encourage that you look at the Hochman method, because it's also an easier method to teach, because it's, so what it is it's a method that focuses on the the skills of writing, in a way, not the mechanics of writing, but the actual skills of writing in a way that is very more, it's much more narrow.

So you don't work on all the skills all at once, which is the method that most people use, where it's just get them writing. The problem with just get them writing is it doesn't teach this more sophisticated skills.

The other thing that—according to the classes I took at the Hochman Method, this, these programs where you have kids copy other people's writing, that hasn't been shown to—I know for some kids that works, but studies in traditional school classrooms have shown that most kids don't learn to write by copying the writing of other people.

[00:04:27] Amy: Yeah, I think that reading widely definitely supports better writing. It gives you more words to use, more ideas to use. But all by itself, I don't think that for most kids it provides the kind of structure that they need.

So we thought that we would wander through a an idea of what writing might look like across 12 years of homeschooling. How do you start strong? How do you finish strong? What do you do in that messy middle? 

[00:04:58] Blair: I just want to interject something that one of the things that I found really interesting is when you focus on writing as skills-based. Studies have shown that increases the acquisition of content knowledge, but it's also—studies have also shown that it makes kids better readers.

So if you are struggling with a child who is working to transition from learning to read to reading to learn, focusing narrowly on the skills, on writing skills, makes them better able to comprehend what they're reading. And the reason for that is that we don't write like we speak.

And so when your children are reading the writing of others, the sentence structures, they don't make sense to them in a language sense, because, when you think about how you speak, It's not the same language structure. And so you're asking kids to interpret meaning in ways that they're not used to acquiring information.

if you, when you hear that, you're like, wow, yeah—I was, I thought it was pretty eyeopening. Totally. 

[00:06:26] Amy: And I think an important thing to remember with these early years of writing. is that handwriting does not equal writing. Punctuation does not equal writing. A lot of things that we think of as writing don't necessarily equal writing.

What you want to get kids to do is think like writers. And sometimes that can mean scaffolding the pieces of writing that are more challenging. 

[00:06:54] Blair: So let's start where you were talking about with the elementary level and the scaffolding approach. So if you were to start to write down every single thing you need to do to write, the number of skills can be overwhelming.

And you really have to think about cognitive load. And on top of that, when we tell kids just to write, Hey, just write. We aren't just overloading them potentially with the mechanical side of things. There's the whole idea creation. That has to happen and getting those ideas from your brain down your arm onto the page, just stymies a lot of kids, or they've got these huge ideas and they start to tell you this big story.

And it comes out as, I was happy. I went to the park. All these little choppy little sentences because it's complicated to get those big ideas out because it's the writing. They realize, how do I spell this? Oh, how do I make this character? Where do periods go? And one of the things with scaffolding is as you're teaching kids to make the transition from writing to Like writers write as opposed to how they speak, you can do that orally, you can take that in dictation. You can write that for them on a whiteboard so that they can see their words going up on a page, but you remove them from having to get the handwriting aspect. And you can use sentence prompts. There's no reason you can't use sentence prompts to help students.

For example, I'm going to assume most of you have heard of the Pigeon. Why don't you drive the bus? You can say. The pigeon wanted to drive the bus, but, and then kids fill in the rest of that sentence. Now, this is straight Hochman method that I'm talking about here, and that's not the only method for kids, but I would encourage you, if writing is something that your elementary level students struggling with, that you think about how you can make writing instruction more incremental, more intentional, and more focused on the structure of how people write interesting and informative sentences.

[00:09:34] Amy: Yeah, I think, do not underestimate the power of taking dictation for young writers. Just taking that whole holding the pencil, making the pencil make letters, off the table and encouraging them to just think about what they want to say and how they want to say it and how they want it to sound, and you write it down and you can say, Oh, it sounds this sentence is a question, so let's put a question mark at the end or, oh it feels like this is actually two sentences. Let's break it up. Let's put a period here and make it two sentences. And you're doing that from a perspective of actually helping them improve something that they are writing.

You're just doing the physical writing part, which I think is awesome. 

[00:10:19] Blair: You also take the spelling aspect off. Another thing you can do is, oh, you have two ideas, I think we can make this one sentence. You're introducing the conjunctions. The other thing that studies have shown is that grammar is best taught in context.

What Amy was just talking about with the question mark—pick a limited number of grammar skills like, uppercase at the beginning of a sentence and a period and a question mark. That is—my son loved to diagram sentences more than any other thing in school and but that has not been shown to make kids better at grammar.

[00:11:09] Amy: I would argue that diagramming sentences is like doing crossword puzzles or logic puzzles. It's really fun, but, and it's good for people with a certain kind of brain. But but yeah, it doesn't actually help you always learn things the way that you think it will. 

[00:11:26] Blair: That's, yes, I could see that little Sudoku with grammar. So the best way to teach grammar is to limit what you're teaching. And then have kids work on those skills as they're working on their writing. 

[00:11:41] Amy: And I will say I get—every year I teach high school classes at the little hybrid school that I run. And every year I get high school students who don't know to capitalize proper nouns or the first word in a sentence.

And I have to spend a lot of time kind of supporting them through that, right? But if I'm supporting them through that in high school, that means that we are not getting to lots of other more complex grammar things. Because this is a very basic grammar thing that most people should come to high school knowing.

And if you follow a looser format, you gotta make sure that you're going in after it and making sure that your kid understands the conventions of grammatical writing. They are important. It seems silly, but but they do matter. And people will take you less seriously if you're starting all your sentences with lowercase letters and your sentences have no punctuation.

[00:12:38] Blair: Or if it sounds really slangy, as if they just basically picked up their phone and it was typed to text—which I must say gonna a lot every time I send a text to you. It says gonna. I'm like Why doesn't this say going to? I'm learning,.

You did bring up something that I do think we need to touch on is feedback.

I really encourage you if your child it I gave a talk about feedback. One of the things that I said in a talk that really resonated with people was, do not give your child a one star review. Feedback. Think of feedbacks like a Yelp review. One to five stars. Nobody should be giving their own child a one star review, even if you're really frustrated with them.

And do not overwhelm your child with the number of things they're working on. If you have a child, for example, who I don't care what grade they're in. I don't even care if they're in college because I've had college students at UCSD who, some of them, struggled with basic writing. Oh, I'm going into science. I don't really need to write. Yes, you really do if you want to be taken seriously.

But if you've got a child who doesn't know how to punctuate a proper noun and they don't know how to use periods and then there's a whole bunch of other things they don't know how to do grammatically, just choose those two skills and then work your way through it. Do commas later.

If you have a child who is struggling with basic sentence structure, stop with the multi paragraph essays. It isn't a multi paragraph essay with a whole bunch of badly written sentences or sentences that don't show the grade level that you want them.

Just think about a very limited number of things you want your child working on. And then scaffold them to mastery. It doesn't matter how old your child is. It doesn't matter what grade they're in. That's the level they're at. And it can be, I think it's frustrating for older students, when they're struggling with writing, because those are students with big ideas. So are the younger students, but these are students who really want to get their big ideas out. And so I think it's important that we help them be able to do that in writing. What do you—don't you, Amy? 

[00:15:25] Amy: Yes I think it's really important to remember that your job as someone who's supporting a young writer is not to be their copy editor.

It is not your job to go in and fix every mistake that they've made. Pick one or two things, like Blair says, and work on those until they get good at them. And then pick one or two new things. And keep doing that and it will, you'll build those skills. But you'll actually build them. 

[00:15:52] Blair: And don't fix them for them.

No. Say, Ooh, what goes at the, this looks like the end of a sentence. What should go there? This looks like a complete sentence, looks like you've got three complete ideas here. 

[00:16:09] Amy: A lot of people are really tempted to copy edit their kids work. I too have been tempted to do that. So I'm not judging. But it really doesn't help them if you go through and fix all their mistakes.

For one thing, it's very disheartening to get back a paper covered in green circles and lines and cross outs and underlines and for another thing if you're doing it for them, there's no incentive for them to figure out how to do it every time —they know that you're just going to go through and mark it all up for them.

So they never spend the time learning how to do it, when if you said instead. Oh, hey, so one thing I noticed is that like your sentences are not starting with capital letters I wonder why that is—sentences should always start with a capital letter, right? So this should look like yeah this and then you just go back through it together it's much more accessible. 

[00:17:02] Blair: And if you have a child who has any sort of learning challenge with writing, help with that, help them facilitate, especially if it's anything that affects the mechanical side of things, just take some of that off writing. It is such a big such a big job. I heard something recently that really resonated with me and I can't remember—but it was that in order to learn something, you have to forget it a little. And feedback, this was in a discussion that I was listening to about feedback. And it was that feedback should be given in at 24 to 48 hours after the assignment is completed. If it's given on a Friday, Monday's fine.

And then you should, if you're going to let someone correct based on the feedback, which I encourage you to do, 150%, totally do not give feedback unless you're going to let somebody do something with the feedback. You want to have a very short turnaround because you don't want them to have forgotten too much.

[00:18:23] Amy: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Actually, I think that's a really good strategy.

[00:18:27] Blair: I’ll have to dig up the actual saying. It was better than—you didn't need to use as many words as I did to explain it. 

[00:18:37] Amy: So another part of good writing that I think that we often overlook as homeschool parents is that academic writing, unlike creative writing—or maybe like creative writing in some way, like that could be a whole argument—but academic writing requires you to have evidence to support your ideas.

And so I feel like learning how to find and paraphrase or quote evidence for your ideas is an incredibly important piece of writing that sometimes gets overlooked. 

[00:19:17] Blair: I really like this and I think that critical thinking, I love that. I think that critical thinking is really easy to incorporate into writing instruction, especially when you're having the discussion about the sort of evidence and information.

I've taught Ssnce leaving college, I have taught middle and high school level science and elementary level, and even at the elementary level, I talk to kids about where they're getting their information from and how they're using that information. I think that's a really important discussion. You must tell everybody how you would teach this to your high school students, Amy, because actually, let's give them some how to tips.

[00:20:04] Amy: So one thing that I love that works for middle school and high school is to divide a regular plain old sheet of paper into six blocks, three lines down, one line across, write your idea, whatever it is that you're thinking on the center line, and then fill each block with one piece of evidence from the text.

So say that your big idea is that, I don't know, Hamlet has commitment issues, right? That's your big idea. That's what you want to talk about around Hamlet. So you would go through and you would say, okay look. Here is one piece of evidence that Hamlet has commitment issues. He wants to go back to school, but he can't make up his mind to go back to school and leave his mother.

Here's another example of how Hamlet has commitment issues. His dad has asked him to get revenge, he thinks he needs to get revenge, but he can't make up his mind to actually do it. His relationship with Ophelia, all this stuff with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But you fill it up, you fill up the sheet of paper, you're not actually doing a ton of writing.

You're just jotting down ideas, which is different from focused writing. But focusing on finding the evidence and filling up this page with evidence really helps you build your argument.

Another thing that I love, and this is more of a high school thing, is I really like students to do narrative bibliographies.

A traditional bibliography is an alphabetical list of all the sources that you used for a particular project. It’s put into a specific format, right? A narrative bibliography is a little bit different. A narrative bibliography Is the story of how you did research, and I think that this is so helpful for kids.

A narrative bibliography isn't alphabetical, it starts with the first resource that you consulted. And if that was the encyclopedia, or that was a biography of the person that you found at the library, or if that was a research article that you read, wherever you started, whatever kicked off your exploration.

That's the first piece of your narrative bibliography and you explain how you used it and where you went from there, right? I read this biography of Harriet Tubman. Turns out it wasn't such a great biography but it's the only full adult biography of Harriet Tubman out there. But it referenced this meeting that she went to in Seneca Falls. And so my next step is I'm gonna go try to find out what I can about that meeting.

And so you do that the whole way through. You go through step by step the research that you're doing, the things that you're finding. Some of the things won't work and you'll say, Oh, yeah, I consulted this resource and it was really crappy. But you're not actually writing a research paper. You're just building that skill to collect evidence to write a research paper so that later when you do go and write a research paper. You already know all the things that you're doing. You know how to get all the evidence that you need. You've done it.

So you can focus on the writing part of it instead of the research part of it. 

[00:23:13] Blair: Okay. That sounds —so do you have your students eventually write research papers as well? They do eventually write research papers, but they but they start out, you scaffold them with the skills for how to do research.

I never really thought about that because that's the other thing. We just—so we dump kids into writing and say, just write. The most complex, it's really interesting to think about the way we teach math and don't teach writing the same way. It makes no sense. So you would also take issue with the way people just let kids loose with research.

And so you're actually teaching them how research works. That's profound, actually, before getting to I've never—that's the first person I've ever heard approaching it that way. 

[00:24:12] Amy: I feel like it makes a big difference. I feel like I, a lot of kids, when I was in school, and I bet when you were in school, Blair, we had a library day at school.

And we had a research librarian and she would talk to us about how to research topics and show us how to use the microfiche machine—remember the microfiche machine?—and the card catalog. But I feel like with so much stuff online today and so much technologically accessible stuff, we forget that kids need to learn how to use all of that. That they need, like the little research skills, to be able to do it, and I think that is an important part of good writing because I feel like if you're just going on historyisfun-dot-com and collecting a list of facts, you're not really getting good evidence to support your history paper.

You're not really getting good evidence to support your history thinking. But it's okay that you don't know that because no one has showed you.

[00:25:14] Blair: So let's go back to, we were going to talk about middle school, we were going to talk about high school. I think we really talked about, there's a lot we could say about elementary school, a lot. We could say elementary school because we're writing a first grade curriculum right now, but we won't spend two hours talking to you about elementary school—reach out to us if you really have questions. I think in middle and high school, I think that one of the things and I like to do this in elementary school, but I think it's really important to start doing in middle school and high school is to broaden what it means to do a writing project.

For example I, my son was the first person that came to me and said, Instead of writing a paper, can I—this, when he was in 9th or 10th grade—he said, can I, every other paper, can I YouTube a video? And I. said, absolutely, he had really interesting videos, like one about fracking, one about, so they were all non fiction.

They were all—the script was expository. it was fascinating to me, and it really got me thinking—it's actually about the same time I started to see that he was doing that.—it got me really thinking about the innovative ways that we should incorporate writing. Yeah, one of the projects that I had my middle school, high school chemistry class work on was a poster activity, and I was really—I gave kids very explicit instructions for labeling for some of the texts that they would need to describe, pictures, how they would want to organize, and I didn't tell them, wasn't like, Pink by numbers, but I did give instructions because I think one of it's really important in this day and age when so many things are visual that we teach kids how to use their writing to incorporate into visual presentations 

[00:27:35] Amy: Yeah, I think presentations, especially like you say in this world where so much learning takes place online, aew super important I think in a big picture way.

It helps me to think about with writing and everything else—I think there are like three stages, elementary, middle, and high school. And in elementary school—I like to think about Legos, right? So in elementary school, you're looking at all the cool Legos there are. There are different colored Legos. There are different shaped Legos. You look at how you can put one or two of them together. You sort them, get to know the Legos.

And then in middle school, you're using those Legos to build things from instructions that someone else has given you. You're building that Millennium Falcon. You're building all of these various things from instructions.

And then in high school, you have a big bucket of Legos and you are figuring out your own things that you want to build from them.

And so in middle school, I think that a lot of scaffolding is really beneficial. I think focusing on the bricks of creating good writing is so important. Help kids understand what bricks they need to build an essay that argues something. Help them figure out what bricks they need to build an essay that explains something. Ask them what bricks they need to find and to create an essay that describes something. Help them figure out the kind of bricks that they need to do all of these different things.

And help them build it like that. Because then when they get to high school and they have their own ideas that they want to express, they have a whole toolkit that they can use to do it. 

[00:29:19] Blair: So I just want to so the bricks are the intentional lessons. So for example, I, one of the mistakes that I see that is made often when teaching middle school students is that there's an explanation of what an argumentative paper looks like, but the very intentional incremental instructions of this is what should go here.

[00:29:53] Amy: Yeah, like a sandwich, right? Like you need this statement, you need this spread, you need this evidence. And you need this statement. 

[00:30:02] Blair: And these are some of the transitions that you might use. These are some of the word choices. These are some of the conjunctions that you might want to use just to really and I know people worry that then it won't seem original, that then it will seem more formulaic.

I think that the concern that kids will write something that feels formulaic, it gets away from the point that a lot of times when someone is first practicing what they're learning, it looks very formulaic. And it is very formulaic. What's the problem with that? What is it? Perfect practice makes perfect performance.

And in this case, you're getting someone to practice. Before they write the original screenplay. Yes! Or whatever.

[00:30:58] Amy: It builds so much confidence. Because kids see that they can do it. 

[00:31:02] Blair: Then it becomes automatic. What parts go where? And once that becomes automatic, once that's the form—the formula of, for good writing, some of those are learned.

And whether you realize it or not, there, there really are a lot of formulas that go into writing. One of the things in The Writing Revolution they talk all the time about is appositives as a way to add information in a condensed way. And it's really interesting to me as someone who writes science curriculum, because I use appositives all the time.

When I introduce a term, for example, if I'm going to use species and let's say I defined the word in chapter two and it's chapter five and I'm using it and I'm not sure if kids will still remember what the definition is. I use an appositive. And a lot of kids who, if your child has never been taught how to write an appositive, number one, they're not using them in their own writing. And it's a really common writing convention.

But number two, they often don't understand what that little phrase is after the word species. They don't understand what the author just did was to redefine species for them. And it's eye opening, and so teaching those writing conventions and then asking children to do them—we don't worry about it in any other subject besides writing that it's going to make our kids writing seem kind of formulaic.

We don't worry about it in math. In fact, we teach kids in math, copy this method, copy this procedure, you'll get the right answer. We don't think to ourselves, Oh, my child is never going to go get a math degree from college. They're never going to be able to do something creative with math. Because they learned it in this formulaic way.

It's just really interesting that we do that with writing, which is way more complicated than any other subject. 

[00:33:09] Amy: I think that there was a very reasonable desire to make kids see writing as something that is fun to do. I think that a lot of this kind of just write for fun, just write what you feel, write whatever you want, comes from a place of wanting to make writing fun for kids.

But it turns out that for a lot of kids, not knowing how to do something well is not that fun, and they still hate writing, and they also don't know how to do it. 

[00:33:38] Blair: And so they hate it even more because they look at the person, they look at someone else in their age and they're thinking to themselves, wait a minute, how do they know how to do that?

I'm telling you, the older your child gets, the more, whether you see it or not, the closer attention they're paying to the work their peers are doing. My son in college, I hear him and his friends, they compare with each other and they talk about who's good at something and who is better than them and who came to them for help and it, they pay a lot of attention to that.

And so you are, especially with writing, you are much better off making sure that your child has the writing skills that they need. Yeah. And it's not that easy to teach, but take the time to think about the skills. And I actually would recommend all the way that you teach it skill based, with a skills based approach.

[00:34:46] Amy: It also takes away some of the emotional piece of it. Creative writing is really personal. And. It doesn't feel cool to tell your kids that they need to change their story because the plot structure, like the plot arc doesn't work. They need you need a climax, you need a climax in your bunny story.

It, it feels weird to critique that kind of thing when you're teaching writing to your kids. But if you're writing in a sentence about bunnies, a factual sentence about bunnies from what you've learned about bunnies in science, It's really easy to say, Oh you know what? I do think this is a great fact, but can we express it more clearly?

[00:35:28] Blair: So I think that a lot of people, kids, and we've already talked about AI, but I think that we I think that writing is so important. I think that AI is not going to do it all. I think that, first of all, it's got to get the information from somewhere. But I also think that there's so many forms that writing can take.

If you believe the world is moving increasingly online, I think that, and if you believe that AI is going to begin to do a lot of the jobs, I don't think writing then becomes obsolete. I think that the sort of writing that people are doing might change the way it looks or you might be writing, you might be spending more time writing things for online presentations or something like that.

But that the more skilled you are at writing, just basically skilled at writing, the better position you're in for any way that writing changes and all of the different iterations for how it might look. 

[00:37:02] Amy: Yes. I think it is so important to give people a framework to work from. It helps all of us. I think if you ask a kid to write a three page essay and you've never helped them learn how to write a great sentence, they're almost certainly going to use AI to write that three page essay. If you focus on the sentences, or especially early on, then I think kids are much more likely to try to write it themselves. I think there's something about the jump from sentences to essays where you haven't given them enough scaffolding that makes AI so tempting. I see this with students. They think AI sounds better, and so they want to use AI. But if you're focusing on a sentence instead of a whole essay, You can make your sentence better.

It feels much more accomplishable. 

[00:37:57] Blair: I agree completely. Something we haven't touched on, which is something I still write it. I have hundreds and hundreds of pieces of poetry that I have written. Only a few of them are in books of mine. I've been writing poetry, the first poem that I, I had a poem that was published in a newspaper when I was in fourth grade, and I've been writing poetry since before fourth grade.

I think that poetry is actually a really great tool to use in writing because It is a very sophisticated use of words. It's not a great place for grammar, especially if like me, you like e.e. cummings, but it is a, it's the amount of words in poems are, it's just really minimizes the amount of words for very effective delivery of information and I think that is something that—I know my son and I, he loved poetry right along with me. I don't think you just have to if you're like, we're not, poetry's not going to be for us. Songs! Songs are poetry. That, a good song has a story arc or just even if it's something silly. I think that songs do very sophisticated use and songs are interesting.

Because they're bringing in music. I love the way music supports the words in songs. I just think that melding is actually academically mind blowing, 

[00:39:53] Amy: No, it is. Some of the best work that my students have done in the world of writing about poetry has been writing songs in response to poems, where they try to use the same themes and the same images but in different ways and they set it to music and it is like you said, it's mind blowing, it's amazing, it's incredible and insightful. 

[00:40:16] Blair: And so I would encourage you to incorporate some poetry Now, one of the things that'll happen as a student starts to write poetry or songs is that some of what they give to turn in will seem imitative.

Imitation, that is a student finding something that resonates with them and what they're doing is they're practicing the writing style. That imitative writing is totally different than plagiarism. If somebody's directly copied, obviously that's plagiarism, or if they've changed five words, obviously that's a problem.

But if what you're seeing is the same structure, somebody takes oh, some famous Pink Floyd, I can't think of the name of it. Somebody takes some famous song, then, that has the same tune, has a similar structure, but the words are different. That's okay. 

[00:41:19] Amy: Yeah because we were talking earlier about how copying a writer's work for word verbatim in your own handwriting isn't really beneficial to developing writers, but imitating someone's style can be incredibly beneficial to developing writers. They're very different things. 

[00:41:42] Blair: Yes, and so I want to, I have that and frankly, in my own, when I was much, when I was in my teens, I can remember a couple of times using the structure and making something and recognizing it was imitative—and not being proud of it, and now as I understand how people learn and I understand what I was doing was I was teaching myself a structure that I actually really, that really resonated with me. And so just be thoughtful if you start to see that. And we, and I only bring that in terms of poetry because we don't actually have the same issue when somebody's imitative in another area.

For example, if you ask somebody to write a science paper or a lab—Hey, I want you to do a lab report—Imitative is not bad. What's bad is when you get something in your thinking to yourself as a teacher, somebody grading somebody's work, you're thinking, wow, okay, should they even understand what goes there?

So that sort of imitation as somebody is learning how, the structure of a certain type of writing can actually be very important, and it really depends on how someone learns if they use that or not. 

[00:43:02] Amy: I saw the funniest meme someone posted me about, about this, where they said that people who write, that we could consider all academic writing, academic fan non fiction.

So it's fan fiction, but fan non fiction, because you're basically just copying other people's styles and ideas and bringing your own spin to it and putting your own stuff in it. And I thought that was very funny. 

[00:43:28] Blair: It's actually really interesting. I write science courses, I think most people listening will know.

And I wouldn't be writing a good science course if I didn't present the facts that, if I'm teaching about weathering and I didn't present what a sixth grader should be learning about weathering it wouldn't be good. And so what makes nonfiction good, especially academic writing is that is the voice you bring to it.

And that's what's really interesting. So you really, you're stuck with you're secular, want to use evidence based, you're stuck with a, the same facts that someone else is going to use. And how do you present those? What words you use? What illustrations do you think do a good job of highlighting that?

And so it's really very interesting how you go about doing that. And so I like that.

[00:44:26] Amy: I just thought it was very funny because I do think that we all go through stages where we're—I'm, I know that I personally sometimes go back to my high school essays, and I'm like, oh, this is very T. S. Eliot fan nonfiction. Like I was basically copying T. S. Eliot. And I think that's like really normal.

And I turned out to be a reasonably fine writer. So I think, so I'm going to say it's like part of the process. Finding writers who you admire and who you want to emulate. That's part of finding your own voice as a writer. 

[00:45:00] Blair: I really liked for a number of years e. Cummings. And I can tell when I wrote during the e.e. cummings years my name, I didn't capitalize this letter on my name.

[00:45:19] Amy: I still don't capitalize my name and my email signature. 

[00:45:23] Blair: Let me, I want to come back to feedback just a moment. For a minute here and something we didn't bring up with the feedback and you said something it really reminded me of this with whenever you give feedback. This isn't just for writing. It's for anything. Be very targeted. Great job is just as bad of feedback as—I like Amy uses a green pen, not a red pen. That is so Amy—something is marked to shreds and the reason great job isn't good by itself. You didn't tell the person what they should keep doing to do a great job. So you should be very explicit with your feedback. It shouldn't be overwhelming. Find something that they did great. Find one or two things that were good that somebody really did a good job on and state that.

As far as what they should be working on and we can all work on something. Let's say you're working on writing and punctuating a complete idea and you've got a learner who this is the first time that they have done that. Great job. You wrote a sentence. It's a complete idea. And you remember to use a period and an uppercase.

You're probably going to stop there. This is a student who, they finally have turned this into. Let's say you get, you've got another student—this is how you can differentiate—working on the same assignment, who they've, they're, they have no trouble with sentences and they give you something like the boy was happy, punctuated correctly. Then for that child, you can circle the word happy and acknowledge the fact that they totally did exactly what you asked for. Circle the word happy and ask them to vary their vocabulary. Scaffold them if you need to.

So there's always work that someone can do, but feedback is a fine line between any time somebody has worked really hard and finally succeeded. That is all the feedback I think that you should give them. Don't you agree, Amy? But if maybe you don't agree. If you don't agree,

Amy: I actually do agree a hundred percent. And yeah, so don't, if you're like, Oh yay, we check that box. Now we're onto the next thing. Don't go onto the next thing too soon. Give them space to celebrate the victory.

For high schoolers, I think a really great piece of feedback is asking students to, to give feedback on their own work.

When my students turn in an essay or a paper, I always ask them to tell me the three things that they were focused on with the essay. What were the three things they were trying to do? What they think is the strongest part of their essay, the part of their essay that they feel like could be improved, and what they would have done if they had an extra 24 hours to go back over it.

And I get really good, and their comments are almost always the same ones that I would give them, because they're very perceptive by high school.

[00:48:46] Blair: So do your high school students, when the first time they're asked to do that, do they just sit there going…? 

[00:48:57] Amy: So the first time, they're really good at picking what they think is the worst part of their paper. They're terrible at picking the best part. They're really good at saying what they would do with the extra time. They're usually able to come up with one or two things that they're trying to do, but it's hard for them to come up with that third one. And so they grow in the process.

But yeah so there, there are some blank like stares, and they really hate saying what the best thing they did is, they really hate that. That is a big hurdle for them. But I think—like I say when they do it, they're almost always right. Like I guess that's not an objective, it's this objective thing. But I usually agree with them. I'm usually like, oh yes, that absolutely was the best part. 

[00:49:40] Blair: That's actually really—so because revision is the most important, really most important. You've got to have the idea got to revise there's—Getting it down just getting the ideas down, which is where we spend way too much time focused. If you've got a good plan for what you're gonna write, that's the easy part; the revision part is hard.

And so what you are teaching kids is the skill of being able to revise their own work. That's actually—kudos to you, Amy. 

[00:50:23] Amy: I do feel like most of my students leave high school as confident, capable writers, which is what I want. Not all of them are going to go on and do writing heavy jobs in their life, but they all know how to express themselves clearly, how to back up their ideas with evidence, and how to posit the counter argument in a compelling way.  

[00:50:48] Blair: Anything else for this subject topic?

[00:50:48] Amy: No, I feel—encourage your kids to write. Writing is good. And help them do it. Don't be afraid to help them do it. You helping them do it is not taking away their creativity, their originality, or their joy in writing. It can, in fact, promote all three of those things. 

[00:51:08] Blair: And make it skill based.

Honestly no matter what method you use, it really focuses on the skills. With the Hochman method, at the sentence level, they, I really, that really appeals to me. If you can't write a good sentence, why are you working on a multi paragraph essay? Why aren't you working on sentences? And you can write really complex informative sentences. No, they don't have as much information as a multi paragraph essay. But I've graded some multi paragraph essays for college students. You don't even, you get to the end of it, and you're like, what are, I have no idea what to do with this. And that's because they just did a word dump of every single thing. There's no cohesiveness and it's all over the place. And a lot of times it's super redundant. Yeah, you got three paragraphs, but you said the same thing in two of them. And they don't even know it. We're just not teaching people how to get their ideas out of their head on through their arm onto the paper, the computer screen—and that is something worth focusing on and it's worth focusing on much more incrementally than we do. 

[00:52:36] Amy: Blair and I are, in case you can't tell, huge fans of The Writing Revolution. If you are struggling with teaching writing and you're like, I wish someone would talk me through some ways to do this better, I highly recommend you get that from the library or your local bookstore. It is a really great resource.

[00:52:55] Blair: Everybody, not everybody, but the people who are paying attention are asking about Writing Revolution 2.0. I asked the company that, where it's, the publisher of it, and I was told that it's, there's not a big difference if you've already got one book or if your library's got one book. The other book has incorporated the information from some studies that show that a little bit of information about studies that are showing that it's a very effective method for teaching writing, but the other thing that they incorporate is just some new examples from other classes.

[00:53:37] Amy: So don't hesitate if you're like, I wish I had this book, but I'm gonna wait for the 2.0 to come out. Don't wait, go ahead and get it. 

[00:53:43] Blair: Although I think 2. 0 comes out either this month or next month. 

[00:53:46] Amy: Oh, so it's soon now. So it might even be out by the time you're listening to this podcast.

Yes. So I guess that is a wrap for this episode of Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy, brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life We will be back in two weeks. I don't know if you've noticed, but we're actually on a podcasting schedule where it comes out every two weeks. We're got a rhythm going.

And so we hope to see you then.