Phone Interview With Miss Marilyn

Marilyn Howshall will be hosting live telephone conference calls for Lifestyle of Learning™ Beginnings Interviews and today I got to be her guest!

I have received SO much from Marilyn. Because of her sacrificial ministry to me, I've wanted to give something back to her. When I first met her, she was concerned about her fingernails. As a professional, licensed nail tech, I saw an opportunity to bless her and have been doing her nails for the past several months. She will often bring something to bless the kids and we often discuss their learning processes.

One day, she helped me with the kids' writing which I blogged about here.

This simple instruction has made the world of difference in our table time and is what we discussed on the phone call.

When we started homeschooling, I used a VERY intense writing curriculum, then we moved into copywork and recently I was printing a photo and having the kids write three sentences about the photo. This turned out to be busy work so I stopped.

In its place, we are doing "real life writing"...mostly thank you notes since Christmas. I'm having the kids write a rough draft of the thank you and then copy that onto stationery. We've been focusing on doing their BEST WORK. Quality over quantity.

Marilyn guided me to proofread and correct their real life writing with a red pencil. She had me explain to the kids to expect the red pencil and it was a tool to HELP them and not to fear it. I am to not just leave them to write alone, but be in the process with them and take a detailed look at their work. I'm looking for proper letter formation (is this too high? is it round enough? is it well formed?). I'm looking for proper punctuation, grammar and spelling.

You can see a sample of Dan's writing before I started correcting and helping him and after we started with the red pencil. He grips his pencil so tight that his hand gets sore quickly so we've had discussions about how to help reduce the pain when writing.

In public school, the kids are expected to write creatively AND work on their handwriting at the same time starting very early. This is MADNESS and contributed to Daniel hating to write.
Next month, Marilyn will have me as a guest again and we'll discuss our progress. Stay tuned.

My Master Negotiator

Why did Daniel take these photos? He thought if he took photos of words maybe I wouldn't make him WRITE any words today...yes, that's right, he was hoping to persuade me to accept the photos for his writing work today! Uh, nice try (and very creative I might add), but...no.

Miss Marilyn and Writing

My sweet friend Marilyn has blessed me so much today. She brought notebooks her kids did years ago and talked to me about writing, especially with Daniel. Right now they each write three sentences per day with a photo of something they did (or they can choose a copywork sheet). I've been feeling like it is time to bring that up a notch but wasn't sure what that would look like.

She showed me how to gently proofread their work and take them deeper by helping them with detail. Thank you SO much Marilyn!

Sarah's New Book

Even though that photo looks posed, it isn't, Sarah is reading to John. Did you know that Sarah is writing a book? (Guess who she's writing about...that's right, the Adventures of Black Kitty!) Not only is she authoring this book but illustrating it as well. Above she's reading her book to her dad and Dan is reading the Batman Lego Wii Guidebook that he reserved for his dad at the library.

Sarah's Inspiration To Write A Book!

Sarah recently told me she wanted to write a book and needed some help getting started. So I grabbed some paper, folded it in half and told her "here's the cover and here inside are the pages". She went right to work and named her new book "The Adventures of Black Kitty". (I know you're all surprised she is writing about Black Kitty!)

She's been writing sentences in her new book instead of copywork this week and I'm so proud of her for continuing with her project. I love that she is writing about real life and things that are important to her.

Today I asked her what made her want to write a book. She told me she just finished reading Library Mouse by Daniel Kirk on her own. This is a story about a mouse who lives at the library and writes books. It is so sweet and clever and has inspired Sarah to write! Thank you Mr. Kirk!

So today we read it together for our read aloud (since we finished WALL-E yesterday). This is one one my new favorites! Sarah asked if she could do the book writing as her daily copywork-yes Yes YES! I love REAL LIFE learning (RLL)!

Real Life Copywork #2

This is so great! I'm printing one photo per day with a blank sheet of lines for each child. The photos are different for each one and sometimes the same. They are ASKING to do their copywork each day, so awesome! Right now they are both only required to write 3 sentences as we are still just finishing our first year of homeschooling. I will increase this soon as this becomes habit. So fun!

These sheets will go into page protectors in a 3-ring binder which will have many benefits. One of which is to look back and see improvement in handwriting!

Real Life Copywork

I've been using Spelling Wisdom by Simply Charlotte Mason. I love this resource! It is designed to be dictated for spelling but I use it differently. I have the pdf version and print one page at a time and then run the page through again with special lines for each child. I use this as copywork. They simply have to do one page per day. The first lessons are very short and have been helpful in getting my children into the writing routine which is part of our bookwork that we do for table time.

But what I really want to do is have them write about their real life. Today we took one of their drawings and they wrote 3 sentences about that picture. They actually LIKED it! I intend to keep doing this! The idea is to get these into a binder with page protectors so we can look back on their progress. Barbie told me to take pictures of their 3D projects and print the photo on a piece of paper for them to write a story about. We just haven't been there...that will come. But taking the drawing and writing 3 sentences is a great transition for us into real life writing!