Wind Rose Homeschool Academy Blog

Our 7th grader and I have been doing a deep dive into opinion texts.  It seemed to me an excellent time to delve into my son's interest in current events while learning how opinion writers organize their ideas and differentiate their voice among all the voices in the field.  After having spent the first half of our school year reading a great deal of dystopian fiction, my son experiences intellectual urgency when thinking and learning about government, ethics, politics, and the individual.  He grapples with the information he hears on the news and that he and his friends joke about among themselves.  He is in that fantastic time when he can still be a child and just play at having opinions and ideas without experiencing too many high stakes consequences.  He is still learning the facts about how our world and politics function while also learning how to think critically about those functions.  It's an exciting learning time, and I am so happy and lucky to n...

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 tea...

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...