I Never Planned to Homeschool My Kids

This may suprprise some of my readers….but I never planned to home school my children. And yet, through a series of people I met and events that took place, the seed was planted and I became interested in the idea of homeschooling. Once I started entertaining this “home school”  idea, one fear kept coming sneaking in…

How will I teach my children how to write well?

I began to search for a curriculum to help me teach my kids to write, well before I decided to home school my children. It seemed that the public schools were just “telling” them to write not “teaching” them to write.

In my search, I found a relatively new program (at the time) called Excellence In Writing (or Institute for Excellence in Writing-IEW). Excellence In Writing starts out with outlining and covers nonfiction writing, report writing, fiction writing, grammar within the context of writing, sentence openers, varying sentence structure and so much more.

Excellence in Writing Facts

1.Use IEW for students 2nd grade up through college.

2. Parents can purchase a teachers manual program and teach their children. This is how I started out because it was one of the few programs that they offered. Now you can purchase a dvd program that teaches directly to the student.

3. Excellence in Writing offers a 100% unconditional money back guarantee. I love companies who stand behind their products!

4. IEW Yahoo support groups and local teachers who teach the program. Check out the IEW network online.

Why we love it

Our son Chase used Excellence in Writing Student Writing Intensive, Continuation Course A and Continuation Course B. In 7th grade, after he completed these courses, he took Business 100 at the community college. He had to write chapter summaries each week and take a written essay final. During the final, he was able to write for 2 hours straight and received an A in the course. He then took a placement test for English at the Community College and finished the course with an A.

Other Relevant Articles:

Excellence in Writing-Our Success Story

Excellence In Writing

The Right to Write!

We all have it but somehow, somewhere ,someone told us that we had to have natural writing talent. Someone told us that we weren’t a good writer. Someone told us that we weren’t talented enough. Don’t believe that lie and don’t pass on that lie to your kids. Julia Cameron give us ” An Invitation and Initiaion into the Writing Life.” And I love her for that. She provides easy to read chapters with exercises after each one to help us change the way we see ourselves-we are all writer and we all deserve to write. (rated pg-some chapters may not be appropriate subject matter for young children-please pre-read)