Writing Strands writing curriculum offers creative ideas and resources to help homeschool families teaching the writing process.
Teaching writing skills is simple and effective with this wonderful creative writing course. With 55 pages Level 2 of Writing Strands is a manual for the parents of children about seven years old. It is the only book in the series from which parents must teach. The rest of the series is written for and to the students, and the assignments are written in such a way that the students can write independently introducing them to the writing skill. It introduces the skill of giving thoughts and experiences to others in written form. When a child can write by himself (spelling doesn't count) a sentence similar to, "We live on the corner," or "The dog is big," that child is ready for this level. Even at this level, the assignments produce reports, essays or pieces of fiction. This is an excellent way to introduce the student to the writing skill.
Writing Strands is a writing curriculum designed for the home school. Assignments provide detailed, step by step instruction aimed at improving writing skill.
If you are new to the Writing Strands curriculum please scroll down to see our Overview, Frequently Asked Questions, and a Sample Lesson of Level 2- Writing Strands.
A complete list of the Table of Contents from Level 2 is also shown below.
You can order the Writing Strands Level 2 book separately here.
The complete set includes the Level- 2 book plus the parents book, Evaluating Writing, which is strongly recommended for evaluating student's progress at all levels of Writing Strands.
"Writing Strands is a great way to teach writing in the home school."
-Cathy Duffy
Christian Home Educators' Curriculum Manual
"The best writing program we've found is Writing Strands."
-Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer
The Well Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home
Each book presents parents with:
- Pages for recording the writing problems needing attention to improve writing skill and writing style
- Places to record spelling problems and correct them
- Ways to record, at the semester break and the year's end, the skills mastered
- Places to list those areas that should be reviewed during the next year's work
WRITING STRANDS OVERVIEW
The basis of the Writing Strands approach to the training of young people to use their language well, began with an understanding that, just as in any program designed to produce a sophisticated ability, a planned process of developing skills for established goals would be necessary. We began by identifying the writing skills needed by students entering major universities. We felt that if we could prepare gifted students for that level of writing skill, we could give to all students writing skills consistent with their abilities. Therefore, our goal is to build skills in the following four modes of writing: 1) argumentative exposition, 2) explanatory exposition, 3) creative and 4) research and report.
We felt that if students could 1) persuasively present positions on controversial subjects, 2) explain complicated situations and/or objects or processes, 3) give others the benefit of their research in reports, and 4) control the emotional reactions to their prose, they would be ready for university work. If they were not headed for college, they would still have the ability to use their language well for any purpose they might choose.
To this end, the following principles were adopted by National Writing Institute before work began on Writing Strands. They were our guides in the initial stages of the design of the assignments and they remain operative today.
- 1. Every person can learn to express ideas and feelings in writing.
- 2. There is no one right way to write anything.
- 3. The ability to write is not an exercise of a body of knowledge that can be learned like a list of vocabulary words.
- 4. Both writing teachers and their students learn in any effective writing situation.
- 5. The product of each student's writing efforts must be seen as a success for at least the following reasons:
- A. Students in a writing class are not in competition with anyone else.
- B. There is no perfect model against which any effort can be compared for evaluation, so there must be many acceptable ways to express ideas.
- C. Every controlled writing experience will help students improve the ability to express themselves.
- 6. All student writing efforts are worthy of praise. The best help any writing teacher can give at any point is to show, in a positive way, what is good about a piece and how it might be improved.
- 7. Any writing lesson which is done independently by the student that has the errors marked, the paper graded and returned but does not have a teacher's feedback in the form of reinforcements and suggestions, represents a missed opportunity for the students.
- 8. All writing at any level is hard work, and every writer should be encouraged to feel the pride of authorship.
- 9. All young authors need to be published. This can be accomplished by having their work read to friends or family members, posted on bulletin boards (refrigerators), printed in "books" or read aloud by teachers.
CONCLUSION
At the beginning of this Overview page we listed our goals and the principles that guided our selections of skills and processes. Any writing program should do that and then outline the process of transmitting the selected skills to the students.
Once we had selected the four modes of writing, we divided them into their component parts and assigned those parts (writing skills) to appropriate student age and grade levels. We then had goals and strands of experiences designed for very young children that would lead to training for young adults preparing for university work.
We then had to design assignments to transmit those skills. We devised a formula for use with all of the assignments. 1) We identified the skill to be learned, 2) Listed Objectives, 3) Identified the length of time it should take an average student to complete the assignment, 4) Presented models, 5) Gave pre-writing exercises, 6) Broke the assignment into small increments (days or sessions) and, 7) Presented the student and the teacher with a places to record successes and needs for future work. After six years of testing in classrooms, homes, and tutoring situations, we published the Writing Strands books.
WRITING STRANDS - FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Q. Does Writing Strands teach grammar, punctuation and spelling?
A. Yes, but only on a need-to-know basis. The research all shows that abstracted exercises in grammar workbooks do not carry over into application in the production of written work. Children can be expert at underlining nouns and verbs and not use them with precision. They can diagram perfectly and not be able to write an effective sentence. When students need to understand a rule of writing to do an exercise, that is the time they should learn the rule. The grammar needed for translation into a foreign language is another matter. The research in the training of spelling for the great majority of children shows that memorizing lists of words and testing on those lists employs short-term memory abilities and those exercises do not carry over into use after the tests are taken. The Writing Strands books and the parents' Evaluating Manual show how to avoid the problems of short-term memory limitations.
Q. Does Writing Strands teach just creative writing?
A.Writing Strands is a program designed to teach children how to use their language effectively in creative and expository modes. The upper levels of the series have creative, basic, research and report, argumentative, and explanatory training. The lower levels teach the skills needed by the students to be able to take advantage of the upper levels' exercises. If students complete the Writing Strands series with competence, they will be ready to write any of the papers assigned at university below graduate level.
Q. Are the books consumable?
A. No, except for the Gentle Steps books. They are the only ones in which students write. The others are designed so that the students write on their own paper, and they then can be passed on to younger children.
Q. Is Writing Strands a full language arts curriculum?
A. No, but if you use our Reading Strands book and the speech book called Communications and Interpersonal Relationships you will have a full language arts program. This will give you writing, the interpretation of literature, and personal communication. That's what language arts is: reading, writing and talking.
Q. Should I use Gentle Steps or Writing Strands?
A. Gentle Steps is designed for students with learning disabilities. It should produce for the students the same skills, but it is a much more structured approach to that training. If a student does not have an identified disability, that child should use the regular series of Writing Strands.
Q. What is Reading Strands?
A. Reading Strands is a one-book manual for parents homeschooling children who are between the ages of four and eighteen. It shows the parents how to discuss literature with their children. It has in the index the techniques of interpretation that allow children to determine meaning for themselves. The text explains each technique and gives transcribed tape recorded examples of homeschooling parents using the techniques with their children. It has 15 pages of examples of the Socratic method of teaching literary concepts to children so that parents don't have to tell their children what to think, they can show them how to think about their literary experiences. It has thousands of titles listed by age, grade, and reading level. These books are available in libraries.
Q. Should I use Gentle Steps or Writing Strands?
A. Gentle Steps is designed for students with learning disabilities. It should produce for the students the same skills, but it is a much more structured approach to that training. If a student does not have an identified disability, that child should use the regular series of Writing Strands.
Q. What is Reading Strands?
A. Reading Strands is a one-book manual for parents homeschooling children who are between the ages of four and eighteen. It shows the parents how to discuss literature with their children. It has in the index the techniques of interpretation that allow children to determine meaning for themselves. The text explains each technique and gives transcribed tape recorded examples of homeschooling parents using the techniques with their children. It has 15 pages of examples of the Socratic method of teaching literary concepts to children so that parents don't have to tell their children what to think, they can show them how to think about their literary experiences. It has thousands of titles listed by age, grade, and reading level. These books are available in libraries.
Q. How will Writing Strands help my children be better at communication?
A. Writing Strands is designed to help children use their language with precision. The answer to successful communication is the ability to transmit images, ideas, situations, and understandings so that they are clearly understood. Each of the exercises teaches the skills needed to do this.
Q. Are the books directed to the parents or to the children?
A. The voice in the Writing Strands books from level three up speaks to the children on their levels of understanding. The books tell the students everything they need to know to write the exercises. Parents don't have to be trained to teach writing. The books do that directly with the children. Of course, Gentle Steps I, Writing Strands Level One, and Writing Strands Level Two, Reading Strands and Evaluating Writing are directed to the parents.
Q. How will Writing Strands help my children be better at communication?
A. Writing Strands is designed to help children use their language with precision. The answer to successful communication is the ability to transmit images, ideas, situations, and understandings so that they are clearly understood. Each of the exercises teaches the skills needed to do this.
Q. Are the books directed to the parents or to the children?
A. The voice in the Writing Strands books from level three up speaks to the children on their levels of understanding. The books tell the students everything they need to know to write the exercises. Parents don't have to be trained to teach writing. The books do that directly with the children. Of course, Gentle Steps I, Writing Strands Level One, and Writing Strands Level Two, Reading Strands and Evaluating Writing are directed to the parents.
ASSIGNMENT FROM WRITING STRANDS LEVEL TWO
ADJECTIVES
It should take you four sessions to introduce the use of adjectives. (You could use the term descriptive words instead of the word adjective.)
PREWRITING
Day One:
- 1. As you work through the following day-one exercises, ask your child to write the sentences.
- 2. Introduce a simple object to your child, like a pen or a pencil. Have your child write the sentence: It is a pencil.
- 3. Ask your child to call out in one word a description of the pencil. Your child may say things like "Yellow" and "Long."
- 4. Ask your child to say a sentence that contains one of the adjectives descriptive of the pencil. You might hear, "It is a yellow pencil," or "It is a long pencil." (Remember to give your child time to write.)
- 5. Ask your child to say the sentences again and include two of the adjectives. Your child might say, "It's a long, yellow pencil."
- 6. This might be a good time to introduce to your child the idea of separating adjectives with commas. The rule that guides using commas in a series can be explained by showing that the word and can be used instead of a comma. If and can be used, a comma should go in its place.
Day Two:
- 1. Ask your child to write the day-one sentences so that the pronoun it becomes the noun pencil. Your child might write, The pencil is yellow, or The pencil is long.
- 2. Prompt your child to further descriptions of the pencil by asking questions about the pencil: "Whose pencil is it?"
TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR LEVEL 2
- How To Make Writing Strands Work For You
- Principles
- Assignments, Skills, Objectives
- Assignment #1 What Is It?
Working with adjectives in constructing sentences that give a reader more than one piece of information
- Assignment #2 What We Did
Organizing personal actions and describing them in a logical sequence.
- Assignment #3 Like A Reporter
Presenting actions of others in a logical sequence.
- Assignment #4 Good Deed
>Working with paragraphing in a report on a witnessed event.
- Assignment #5 My Day
Ordering actions and recording emotional reactions
- Assignments #6 Groups
Grouping ideas or items and creating variety in sentence structure in description of them.
- Assignment #7 Smart Bird
Introducing the writing of stories that contain character, problem, and solution.
- Assignment #8 Sell It
Demonstrating a method of convincing others by the creation of an advertisement for radio or television.
- Assignment #9 Interview
Introducing dialogue structure and punctuation through the writing of imaginary conversations with inanimate objects.
- Assignment #10 Dear Family
Working with the organization and format of a friendly member letter.
- Assignment #11 I Helped
Organizing and telling of a personal experience, including reactions to it.
- Assignment #12 What's It Like?
Describing objects by observing and defining differences.
- Assignment #13 "Hi There"
Combining of words and pictures to convey ideas by the making of greeting cards.
- Assignment #14 Animals
Writing of description based on role playing; an introduction to empathy
- Assignment #15 Summer
Using the imagination and the sharing of it with a reader through narration.
- Spelling lists, semester reports, and common problems also included.
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