Writing

My sons learned how to type when they were in elementary school. We started with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and later found Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing with Sponge Bob.
The interactive software

Every single day, people put the skill of writing to ample use. Writing is often ignored by homeschool parents, until children are in middle school. Writing should start around third grade, allowing children the chance to master the skill by middle school. Most homeschool writing curriculums were too easy for my sons and only a small portion revealed to be beneficial to our family. Since grading compositions can be very subjective, it is a really challenging subject to teach. This is also a dilemma for school teachers.   When my sons were in third grade, they learned narrative and expository writing. The level of writing expected at such a young age seemed to be extreme, unnecessary, and stressful for such young learners. Teachers grade students on capitalization, punctuation, sentence structure, subject verb agreement, sentence fragment, sentence structure, transition word, introduction, body, and conclusion. My sons would get discouraged and felt that no matter how hard they tried, there would always be red marks all over their paper. When we started homeschooling, I decided to grade the grammar portion of the composition separately. I would take notes on every grammar mistake, but teach them those concepts outside of the writing class.

Baby Steps to Mastering Writing

My method was simple and it really worked. First, my children learned how to expand on topics. Writing Strands level three proved to be too basic for my 10 year old and 12 year old, but they do a good job explaining how to elaborate on a subject. My son learned how to add information such as size, color, type of material, and object placement if describing a piece of furniture, for example. Although this is too basic of a curriculum for middle school students, Writing Strands can be used as a learning tool to teach students how to organize their thoughts and transfer them to paper.  Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) offers the Medieval or Civil History-Based Writing curriculums. The lessons are based on major historical figures, the Byzantine Empire, The Battle of Hasting, and other topics. Lessons covered writing from key words, summarizing, research, essays, narrative writing, critique, and creative writing.   The author uses the key word outline method, where students read the given information and picks three to four words from each sentence to write a new sentence. Although it is an acceptable method for a beginner, their method of equipping students with source material is unrealistic. 

What Worked for my Children?
I had my children work on the outline until they were comfortable with narrowing a topic. Once they mastered writing the outline they worked on the introduction, followed by the thesis statement. After a few months we added the body, and then the conclusion. It took a month or more for each section. It is a pretty lengthy process, so I went into a lot more detail on how to accomplish this task in my book "From Homeschool to Harvard without paying a cent". My method worked so well that when my son was 15, he won first place for his composition at Florida Atlantic University