LOVING Our New Creative Writing Program!

Jacob is not really taking a writing course yet, but he didn't want to be left out!

I have a love/hate relationship with creative writing. Personally, it was my very favorite subject when I was in school. I still remember my 6th grade teacher reading us a story and then cutting it off and letting us write the ending. I would gladly spend hours working out details, perfecting my characters, looking up new words. I resented having to stop that paper so I could work on math. So I figured that it would be my favorite subject to teach, right?  

WRONG!

I have found creative writing to be the most difficult of all subjects for me to teach. The reason is that it’s subjective. I found that I was always thinking my children could do better, add more detail, work harder on their plots. Poor kids, I didn’t know what was right for their age and maturity level and so I think my expectations were always too high.
 
Over the years we’ve tried many different programs and some have been better than others. My absolute favorite is Story Starters by Karen Andreola. She writes a story and cuts it off and they finish it. I teach this at co-op and have my kids participate with others their own age. They LOVE it! 

But when it comes to the mechanics I have no love fest going on. That is why I ADORE time4writing. Just so you know it does not benefit me in anyway if you join or don’t join. I just cannot recommend it enough.

For just $12 dollars a week I have a certified teacher who teaches, grades, suggests and works with my child one on one to learn and master concepts. If I hired a private tutor it would be a lot more than that. I love that they can login, do their assignment, check their folder and receive the feedback.

 Colton is doing "Middle School Mechanics"!  

This eight-week course is the first of two courses focusing on “boosting the basics” at the middle school level.  Basic Writing Mechanics A allows students to strengthen their foundation writing skills. The course teaches the fundamentals of writing such as: sentences vs. fragments, subjects and predicates, subject-verb agreement, and capitalization.

Sethy is taking the "Elementary School Grammar Rocks" 8-week course!

This course has been created for the youngest eager writers, starting at 2nd grade. During the eight week pre-sentence course, students will be introduced to parts of speech and how to recognize and use them in a sentence. Students will understand how to recognize and form a complete sentence with a subject and predicate. Students will also learn to recognize basic capitalization rules and proofreading strategies.

If you need to add creative writing this program I cannot recommend Time4Writing highly enough!