One regret I have about my time in kindergarten through high school is that I didn’t learn more vocabulary words, so I didn’t know how to integrate them into my writing. While I enjoyed spelling, I rarely took the time to learn what a word meant and how to use it. Now that I’ve graduated college and have…
Essential Conversations
This blog is devoted to all aspects of writing, literature, and teaching. We are excited to partner with you on your homeschool journey and provide you with helpful and quality content in our blog posts.
Why Writing is Important in Life after Homeschool
“But When Will I Use This in Real Life?”: Why Writing Matters After Homeschool Summertime (when the living is easy) is an excellent span in which to reflect on the past year of schooling and the coming year as well. What subjects were successfully learned? Which topics caused troubles and struggles? If your homeschool…
Summer Writing Prompts for Homeschool Students
Summer is a time for fun and a break from the rigors of the school year. However, as Laura pointed out in the previous blog post (check it out, it’s really sweet), summer can also be an opportunity to continue growing! She encouraged parents to guide their children’s reading through the vacation months, but parents…
3 Ways to Encourage Homeschool Students to Read
As a member of the Essentials in Writing curriculum team, my hope is that students learn to enjoy reading and writing as a lifetime pursuit—not only when they are working on course assignments but also during the summer months. Truly, when a student learns to fall in love with reading, they have made a friend…
For the Homeschool Parent: Dealing with the “Summer Scaries”
As homeschool parents enter the month of June, they may also encounter a phenomenon that I like to call the “summer scaries.” This is the few months in which they worry that their homeschool students will promptly forget everything they learned over the past school year, especially in more practice-based subjects like math and writing….
Common Homophone Mistakes
In the age of smartphones, computers, and technology, the subject of spelling may not seem all that important thanks to a certain ever-helpful invention—spellcheck. Gone are the days of proofing papers for spelling mistakes! Banished are the never-ending lists of spelling words in homeschool curriculum! Dictionaries? Who needs them? Just rely on the squiggly…