Watching my kids develop writing skills has been a really strange thing to me. I feel like they've all
had almost no writing training, and yet they have all hit their stride just
fine. They are all big readers--that is huge.
I tried several programs--Writing Strands is one we did a bit of--we all
grew tired of it. Classical Writing is one that my older son
and I really liked -- but my younger son did not. My older son was already a
pretty good writer, and the level we did was a bit below him, but the style
suited his personality. But it caused fights with my younger son, so we gave it
up after a year. And now he's the one who, though he'd always said he wanted to
be a paleontologist, recently said he wanted to be an author--go figure!!!
I think an understanding of grammar is important, both for constructing
accurate sentences in English and for learning foreign languages. We begin
Easy Grammar in 3rd grade and continue until 8th. I've tried to get my kids to
do ABeka high school grammar, but none of them has gotten very far in it, and
that's OK. But my kids haven't needed much help with spelling, again probably
because of the large amounts of reading. I think a small dose is great in
middle school--not before, and not after--just some work with the most commonly
misspelled words is all we do. I once bought a comprehensive program, but my
kids all hate workbooks, so we skipped over the first five books. You can't tell
me that if they miss their "Spelling A" book when they are six, they still
won't be able to spell "kite" when they are sixteen.
Much of this touches on the main point, which is that writing is
SUBJECTIVE--the most subjective subject of all--and as such it is heavily
personality-based. It is not a matter of learning facts and figures. Writing
comes out of your thoughts, feelings, and heart. If you have no thoughts or
feelings about a topic, it's excruciating to write about it. Good writing
follows a few basic rules: say the most you can with the fewest words (avoiding
passive constructions and choosing vivid verbs helps with that), follow a
reasonable train of ideas through to a conclusion, which process is strengthened
by the adage "tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em--tell 'em--tell 'em what
you just told 'em," and speak from the heart. I've read so many ghastly essays
in which the writer didn't care a hoot about his topic, and was just filling out
the word count--thank goodness we don't have to do that as homeschoolers.
So, after many failed attempts at using writing programs with my children,
what we mostly do is just use writing in real life--writing letters, working on
Merit Badges, and my high schoolers write up an occasional report on what
they've been learning about--in science, history, or whatever. In their mid teens they all found something that they wanted to express--whether it was
a fantasy novel or a romantic screenplay (starring a certain married daughter and
her movie star idol--shhh--that one was a secret). Writing is "words that
stay" and it is part of the human condition to want to express oneself and have
others listen. So far I haven't had any children who didn't, after they were
mature enough, want to join in the conversation.
