Wind Rose Homeschool Academy Blog

One of the questions I am most often asked by other homeschooling parents is how I teach writing, especially academic writing.  I plan to write several blog posts this year focused on the teaching of writing in the home school as well as provide very specific lessons and units of study to anyone who would like to explore them.  Before I could encouraged my children to engage in academic writing, it was clear to me they both needed a “palate cleanser” first. For the process we took to develop that comfort with writing and about how we use the Workshop Model in our home school, see Growing Writers. So, how does teaching the writing process fit into this gentle approach to growing writers? Direct Teaching Teaching children how to write is not the same as assigning writing.  Children need us adults to explain how the writing process works and show them how to do each step; so during the mini-lesson portion of our literacy studio workshop, I carve out specific lessons to teach brainstormi

I love short stories; I feel like they are an underappreciated art form.  There is something about the roller coaster of the rise and fall within a short story, and the tight nugget of that adventure occurring in the span of less than an hour of reading.  I'm in awe of short story writers. This fall, our 7th grader is studying short stories.  We are using the collection Little Worlds: Short Story Classics to Inspire Readers edited by Peter Guthrie and Mary Page.   We will begin using an analysis tool I created, and once we feel solid in that form of analysis we will move on to more open-ended analysis.  Download Free Short Story Analysis Tool "The Sniper" Short Story Analysis  Once he can clearly analyze conflict, problem/solution, etc., he can start analyzing just the parts of stories that make him excited, using a strategy another teacher taught me called Key Passages. Download Free Key Passages   Both of these tools are free downloads for you, as well as an example of

One of the questions I am most often asked by other homeschooling parents is how I teach writing, especially academic writing. I plan to write several blog posts this year focused on the teaching of writing in the home school as well as provide very specific lessons and units of study to anyone who would like to explore them. How do we grow a writer? Do we get out the red pen? Get a book of writing prompts? Assign topics?  Alas, no. Writers grow from love. Writers grow from trust. Growing a writer takes time and patience. Before we get much further, I need to share a bit about the way we organize our learning time with our children. The Workshop Model We use the workshop model in our learning as often as possible and in all subject areas. This model for learning is an approach, a teaching strategy, not a curriculum. It’s an approach you can use given any set of learning objectives. In our home school, we use the Common Core standards to guide our curriculum choices. I

We recently sparked the flame for our passion and interest in environmental learning , and then the children were ready to take action to begin a new focus on reusing and reducing in addition to our recycling efforts. This will be one of multiple posts about how we are integrating our enviornmental learning into our home school. So many of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s learned how important it is to recycle, and thus, we focus a lot on that and feel that we are doing enough.  But we now know just recycling is not enough.  We also have to increase our efforts to reduce and reuse, and in our house, composting is our first step in reusing. Building our Composting Schema: A Reading List We started by building on schema (our knowledge) by reading books together about composting and by creating a how-to based on our learning. What's Sprouting in My Trash? by Esther Porter Composting (Do It Yourself Ecology) by Buffy Silverman Compost! by Linda Glaser

Respecting and protecting the interconnectedness of the natural world is a core value for our family, so when we began homeschooling, we knew that we would devote time and space to examining our role in protecting the environment. One of our children is very sensitive and quite prone to anxiety, so anytime we engage in learning that involves a call to action, it's important that I tread carefully and ensure that while she hears the message of urgency, she feels safe and empowered. Thus, it was important to me that we focus on stories about activists who saw a need and were successful in their endeavors and that we talk about how we can support our local environment in Kansas.  As we delved into these stories together, we were able to examine cause and effect relationships, how the various parts of our web of existence affects one another, and how we as a part of that web can have positive effects. If You're Not From the Prairie by David Bouchard We started with thi

One of the most important learning spaces in our home is the Safe Place, which we learned about from Conscious Discipline, founded by Dr. Becky Bailey.  This is a place for our children to go when they are feeling upset to process their feelings, calm, and problem solve. We have been using the Safe Place for six years now; our oldest is twelve and still sometimes goes to the Safe Place.  The children chose two locations for our Safe Places: one in the living room behind a chair and one in the dining room. The children work through the five phases when they are there: I am, I calm, I feel, I choose, and I solve. When they were younger, we spent most of the time one of our children was in the Safe Place with them.  Now, less. Example Use with Younger Child My child is writing in a book she's making but she is frustrated with the way her handwriting looks.  She shouts and throws her pencil. I take a few deep breaths to be calm before I talk to her.  Throwing things makes me

For most of us parents, this question has popped up in our internal monologue at least once, if not countless times. How do I get her to clean her room? How do I get him to remember to take out the trash? How do I get them to do x, y, or z? And for us homeschoolers who don’t unschool: how do I get them to do their math/writing/science/etc.? It wasn’t until I attended Conscious Discipline’s Summer Institute that it really clicked for me.  In a home based on parenting without punishments or rewards, getting them to do something is never the goal.  Neither is convincing them to do something. Rather, the goal is to create an environment and relationship with them in which they choose to do x, y, and z.   They choose to do the task because it is 1) keeping themselves or someone else safe, 2) helpful, or 3) kind. But how? The Safekeeper Ritual The Safekeeper Ritual from Conscious Discipline is key for our home.  It provides our children with the reasoning behi

“What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” The question posed by the characters in Haroun and the Sea of Stories leads us into a magical adventure designed to delight as well as to push us to explore the value of fiction, the role of story, the role of narrative, the role of the legacies our oral and written traditions in our lives. Most readers who are familiar with Salman Rushdie think of him as a writer of magical realism for adult readers and associate him most often with his novel Midnight’s Children , which won the Booker Prize, and The Satanic Verses , which is his most controversial book. However, this children’s fable will not fail to captivate you and your children. I first read Haroun and the Sea of Stories in my 20’s and loved it for its craft and exploration of the power of writing, storytelling, and the spoken word. My 12 year old son and I were recently exploring my bookshelves, looking for our next bedtime read aloud. Now that he’s a preteen, we hav