Mr. T is just beginning to type his writing on his own.

Warning: some of what follows may sound like heresy to traditional educators.

Recently a reader of this blog sent an email asking for advice. She’s a homeschooling mom, and she wrote after spending time with other homeschooling friends, and hearing how they teach writing to their kids. Basically, these parents have their kids work daily at their writing. Younger kids draft a sentence each day and then combine them into a paragraph at the end of the week. An older child writes a paragraph each day, and then combines them into a traditional “five-paragraph essay.”

My reader writes:

“I wonder if this approach is going to encourage a love of writing and an ability to establish an authentic writing voice of one’s own.”

She then went on to describe some of the writing that her kids do, based on their interests. I won’t describe the details, to protect my reader’s privacy, but she writes,

“Their writing experiences are few and far between, but in my opinion, so rich, so full of voice and purpose…”

Here’s what she wonders:

“Can these kinds of few and far between writing activities be “enough” if they are rich enough and gradually become more frequent?  How can a family keep a sense of play and joy and authenticity in writing while making it a habit, too?  And how can a parent know when it’s time to push a little more and when it’s time to wait?  And am I being overly cavalier and irresponsible to think that teaching my kids paragraphing skills can wait a while?”

There are so many good questions here, enough to fill a chapter in a book. Rather than try to address this reader’s wonderings in an elegant, cohesive way–which would have me tapping at my computer here for days–let me offer instead some random thoughts.

• The notion of learning through routine practice is mostly a school notion. Practicing small pieces of a larger skill day after day is a way of ensuring that a large group of children will eventually learn that same skill. The assumption is that the child will learn the multiplication table, or the rules of grammar, or the parts of the body if he or she works at them repeatedly. The teacher can’t be aware of learning that happens outside of the classroom, in daily life, so all learning gets focused into a lesson format. Many of us who grew up going to school have unwittingly become convinced that a person needs this sort of routine practice in order to learn something.
• Adult-driven, routine practice-type learning rarely takes the child’s interest and motivation into account. In fact, in most cases, the child isn’t terribly engaged in this sort of practice. He or she does it simply because it is required.
• On the other hand, when a child’s interest and motivation are there, that child can often pick up concepts and skills rather quickly. Repeated practice isn’t necessary. Your daughter figures out how to multiply mentally because she wants to win at Yahtzee; your son understands how different ancient civilizations affected one another because he enjoys reading The Cartoon History of the Universe.
• This is not to say that repeated practice doesn’t have a role in learning. Repeated practice when taken on by choice can be the deepest sort of learning. When, for example, a child does that skateboard trick over and over to get it down; when she draws manga characters in the margin of every paper in her path; when she keeps strumming her guitar because she wants to be able to play Hey Jude through the finish. The child learns in these situations because he or she is motivated and the engagement is constant. In this case, practice leads to deep learning, yet it doesn’t feel like practice to the child. The child is simply doing what he or she is compelled to do.

So, how do these ideas apply to writing?

If you’re concerned about helping your kids develop writing skills for their futures, I have a few quotes for you.

This year Mr. T and I are delving into California history. With a few other families, we’re visiting a different historical site each month. We’ve already had a few wonderful experiences, which I’ve neglected to share here.  One of these days I’ll catch up.

Meanwhile, this week we went on an overnight living history trip to Fort Ross, on the California coast.

It was an amazing adventure.

Fort Ross was established by Russia during the early 19^th century, as a site for growing food for Russian outposts in Alaska, and a place for hunting otter for the fur trade. The Russian-American Company that developed at Fort Ross was an interesting mix of Russians, native Alaskans and natives from California’s Kashaya Pomo and Coast Miwok tribes.

For the trip, each of us took on the persona of an actual person who once lived at Fort Ross.

Mr. T became Kirill Timofeevich Khlebnikov, an accountant for the Fort Ross Company who kept records of everything from how much employees were being paid to how often the cannons were unlawfully fired. T was part of the militia group on our trip, which meant he got to learn about weapons and help shoot a cannon. He’d be happy to tell you what an 1812 Charleville smoothbore flintlock muzzle-loading musket is. He learned how to follow Russian military commands, how to make rope and how to keep a fire going. He also washed a lot of dishes, something he never seems able to do at home.

I was Paraskov’ia Kulika, a half-native, half-Russian (or Creole) woman who married a Russian. After her husband died, Paraskov’ia worked off his debts by serving as a cowherd for the company. During the trip I served as a cook, which was a whole lot of work involving a whole lot of beets.  (Borscht, anyone?)

The coastal site was stunning. The quality of light–an otherworldly mix of sun and fog—made the whole experience seem a little magical, as if we really had stepped into an earlier world.

Portraying real people, and visiting their cemetery especially, connected us to the people who once lived there in a way that we surely wouldn’t have felt by simply visiting as tourists. The whole experience was powerful.

When I talk to H and Lulu about their childhoods as homeschoolers, it seems like our living history experiences are some of their favorite memories. There’s something about leaving behind real life for a day or two, and living as someone else, that transports and transforms you.

It’s an unforgettable experience.

So I have a new home page. Maybe you’ve seen it? You can check it out here, or by clicking about me in the menu above my header.

The home page is at patriciazaballos.com, where the blog used to live. The blog now gets moved next door to patriciazaballos.com/blog. I’ve been assured that the change shouldn’t effect my blog feed, meaning that if you subscribe via email or RSS feed, you should receive updates as usual. Hope so. Please let me know if it’s not working out for you. Resubscribing may be necessary.

Apparently I’ve become something of a code geek. Not that I know much, but I’ve definitely learned to speak a little PHP and CSS in the two months I’ve spent redesigning the blog, and setting up that home page. I thought that the home page would be fairly easy to put together, but it took even longer than the blog redesign, simply because I had to really tweak the blog template to make the page look as I wanted it to. Do you have any idea how complicated it was to set up those buttons linking to Twitter, Facebook and Flickr? I could tell you a whole story populated with image sprites and sprite generators and Firebug menu item numbers. But one sentence is boring enough–suffice to say that those cute little buttons took about three hours of my life.

Perhaps I’m a slow learner. Nevertheless, the whole endeavor brings us to the topic of do-it-yourself learning.

My home page isn’t just DIY in design; it’s DIY in content. Which has me thinking.

The page is, I suppose, an attempt at professionalizing what I’m doing these days. I used to be a credentialed professional, but my teaching credential is long lapsed and honestly, my teacher training has very little effect on my current life as a homeschooling parent. Less and less as time goes on.

Instead, I’ve been working towards my own goals, outside of institutions and without credentials to prove my accomplishments. Is it audacious of me to assert myself as a writer when I’ve only had a few pieces published? Does the fact that I was paid for some of those pieces make me a professional? If I’d spent two years earning an MFA in Creative Writing, would that earn me more respect than the twenty years I’ve spent studying writing on my own? Does it make a difference that I write in some fashion most days, that I think and read and look at the world through the lens of a writer?

I’ve also begun listing my speaking engagements on that page. I’ve been paid for some of those engagements, but not all. Does that make me a professional speaker? I’m likely hired, in part, due to my  yellowing teaching credential, although what I speak about has little to do with my experiences as a credentialed teacher. Instead, I speak about what I’ve learned from my kids in our lives as homeschoolers, and my own research, and my own experiences as a writer. A quasi-professional writer.

It’s a home page mostly based on my own DIY learning, and that feels a little cheeky of me. But at the same time, what kind of a homeschooler would I be if I didn’t value DIY learning? Do I think my kids are lesser learners because they spent most of their childhoods learning outside institutions? Absolutely not! I think they’re learners in the truest sense of the word. Their DIY learning has had a profound effect on who they are as people, and it certainly hasn’t hindered them when they’ve chosen more traditional, institutional learning for themselves.

I believe in DIY learning for my kids, and I believe in it for myself. I can’t really confer on myself a credential or a degree, I suppose, but I can make myself a home page! I can announce to the world what I’ve been doing and where I’m headed.

And that’s what my little home page is all about.

Oh, what  a crazy time it is. Mr. T turns ten today, and Lulu turns sixteen on Halloween. Multiple cakes and celebrations are involved. Also, I’m trying to fabricate a Thor costume primarily from duct tape. But that’s the sticky stuff of another post.

I haven’t managed a post here in a few weeks. But after writing my last one, on making reading and writing enjoyable on a daily basis, I undertook a little experiment. For a few days I tried to note whenever I saw Mr. T involved in an act of reading or writing. There is no way I caught every occurrence; who knows how often the kid picks up an atlas when he ought to be putting on his pajamas, or labels a map before running out to the backyard?

THREE DAYS OF READING AND WRITING: AN INCOMPREHENSIVE LIST

Reading

Lots of independent random reading. A Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume 3. Assorted comics and graphic novels. The Story of the World, Volume 4. (T found this one on a shelf in our office and picked it up when he saw that it covered WWI and WWII, two eras in which he’s interested but we haven’t explored together. Cracks me up that he chose to immerse himself in what some would consider a textbook.) House Mouse, Senate Mouse by Peter J. Barnes.  Scholastic Almanac 2011 and National Geographic Kids Almanac 2011. Interesting thing about T: he doesn’t tend to read many novels, although he loves comics and graphic novels. For a short while I worried about that, until I realized that for every novel he doesn’t read, he probably reads a dozen nonfiction books. He especially loves atlases and almanacs, and all manner of science and history books. At the library, I check out armloads of books that might intrigue him and leave them lying around the house. I strew them, as Sandra Dodd would say. I’d wager that a giant chunk of T’s knowledge has been gleaned from strewn books that he’s picked up and read.)

Family bedtime read-aloud: Wildwood by Colin Meloy. (Because Mr. T’s parents are Decemberists fans and we lived in Portland for a time.)

Daytime read-aloud: Adopted by Indians by Thomas Jefferson Mayfield. This is a bit of an aside, but I have to share: Mr. T and I are exploring California history this year, and going on monthly trips to historic sites with a few other families. We’re reading this book along with our study of local native people. So interesting! It’s the true story of a Texan boy who came to the Gold Rush with his family, and was taken in by a local tribe. Apparently Mayfield never told his story until just before he died, and a teacher-friend transcribed it for him. It’s fascinating to hear about San Francisco before it was even called San Francisco, and to hear what the Central Valley looked like when it was practically untouched.

Bedroom audiobook: The Fellowship of the Ring by Tolkien. This is the book of the month for T’s book group. T would never have the patience to read it at this point, so I checked out the audio version for him. Sixteen disks! Actually, T often “reads” his book club books via the audio version. Is this cheating? I don’t think so. Can T engage in a discussion on the book at his meeting? Yep. Seems like that’s the point.

Car audiobook: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. T almost always chooses the audiobook we listen to in the car; I really wanted to hear this one so insisted on picking for a change. What a fantastic first-person narrative! Reminds me a lot of the young female narrator in the recent film version of True Grit. Calpurnia uses lots of wonderful, old-fashioned words that should never have become lost to us. Big surprise: T likes it, especially the admiration for Darwin and the natural world that Calpurnia and her grandfather share.

An information packet about Fort Ross, a local historic site and the location of an upcoming living history overnight that T and I will be attending. T’s taking a class with other kids who will be attending the trip. Reading the packet was an assignment for the class, yet T kept dragging his feet about getting it read. Instead of nagging him, I read the packet aloud. Suddenly he found the content fascinating and it prompted all sorts of discussion. And I reminded myself that reading aloud is sometimes what it takes.

Reading about Lego Ninjago online. To some parents, I suppose, this could seem like frivolous commercialism. The thing is, T isn’t reading because he’s lusting after the toys. (Although he wouldn’t mind a few of the small sets for his birthday.) No, what interests him is the Ninjago world and all its inhabitants and their interactions. (How do I know? I asked.) It may be online reading, commercially produced, but still, T is reading and absorbing and considering the information. Pretty much the same as he does when he reads an interesting book.

Practice questions for upcoming Geography Bee. My young geography freak is considering entering a local bee, so he and I took turns reading and answering questions from last year’s bee. And yes, he puts me to shame.

Discussion while reading The Elements by Theodore Gray. T loves this book, and picks it up regularly. This time, as he was reading, he piped up: “You know why I like this Elements book? It has really good writing. It’s complicated, but they simplify it so much that you can understand it. It feels like the writer is talking to you, like when he says, (reading aloud): If you find this section too technical, feel free to skim it–there isn’t going to be a quiz at the end.” A casual conversation about writing style in a scientific book, begun by a kid? Love it. (Another aside: Recently I asked a friend’s 13-year-old if there were any nonfiction books with writing she admired, and she also named The Elements. Good stuff.)

Writing

a variety of Google searches:

1. Many searches for images of Thor, as Halloween costume research. One led us to the very fun site of comic book artist Chris Giarrusso. Fantastic place to visit for comic-loving kids.
2. A search for the word used when meeting with a king, which neither of us could recall. (“Audience”).
3. A search for a map of “the ancient world”. T looked this one up independently, and it led him to a geography quiz site, which led to a good 45 minutes of reading and answering questions online. (See, that’s just one example of reading that I missed documenting above.)

Are Google searches writing? Most definitely, I would argue. In order to search successfully, you need to refine your goals and tinker with your terms. The ability to find information is crucial for kids in this digital world.

Continued work on his nonfiction piece on Lego Universe for our Writer’s Workshop. T is just beginning to type some of his writing on his own, and is very motivated to do it. Exciting.

The Workshop itself. Practically two hours of discussion about writing! Also a writing exercise: Think of something you like to do, and make a list of how to do a great job at it. T’s subject? Playing Lego Universe, of course. (Third aside: yes, yes, I’m still working on that e-book about how to facilitate writer’s workshops! Will get it up here in the next few months!)

A questionnaire for developing his Fort Ross character, required for the Fort Ross class. Not writing he wanted to do, and he did a minimal job.  I had to encourage him to move beyond one and two-word responses. (What do you look like? Handsome!) Still, I didn’t push too hard; I think that would have only made him dislike the activity altogether. This goes to show the difference between assigned projects and self-chosen ones, like the Lego Universe writing mentioned above. I’d hate to think of how T’s writing might (or might not) be developing if he were in school and not given many opportunities to write on topics of choice.

Many lists of invented characters and maps of invented worlds. I find these scattered around our house like dust bunnies.

Writing and responding to friends in the text box while playing Lego Universe.

A thank you postcard to his grandparents.

* * *

Funny thing is, these were three very busy days, three days in which T and I had minimal time working together. Still, I’m amazed at how much reading and writing actually took place. I also notice that most of the examples here fall outside the scope of traditional reading and writing instruction. Reading comic books and Lego websites? It’s reading! Googling Thor and messaging while gaming? Writing! There were times in which I helped T out, scaffolding the learning for him: reading aloud when he didn’t want to read something, finding audiobooks when reading was challenging, not pushing too hard on a class assignment. Also, there were many small acts of reading and writing: casual conversations, Google searches. Sometimes I think we parents don’t notice these small moments, but a reading and writing education can be built on them.

Consider noting the reading and writing going on in your days. It can be surprising! I’d love to hear a few random examples of how reading and writing creeps into your lives. Your examples will help readers better understand the point of my last post: You can help your kids love reading and writing every single day.

What would a teacher say about that writing posture? That pencil grip?

The other day I read these words in a comment from Amy:

“…So many of your suggestions for working with little (pre) writers and readers have wisely echoed in my brain right as I am about to pull the panic trigger and rap him over the knuckles with phonics. So instead we listen to Magic Treehouse audiobooks and I help him make comic books full of monsters and robots and I remember that I Am Not Alone and Someday He Will Read (and write, too).”

Smart woman, that Amy. Rap him over the knuckles with phonics. Ha! I always appreciate her play with words.

Writing a response to Amy, I thought about a post I wrote over a year ago, and the absolutely terrific feedback I received in the comments. In the post I asked parents to share their hopes for their kids and writing, and so many readers wrote back, generously holding their hearts open for me. Their words are definitely worth a read.

Over and over again, parents mentioned some variation on the hope that their kids would enjoy writing, that they’d find value in it, and be motivated to do it.

This is what I wrote to Amy:

“When it comes to reading and writing (and maybe everything!), I think my best advice for parents is this: what is your ultimate hope for your child? If your ultimate hope is to raise a child who loves reading, then how can you help him or her love reading today? By reading to him? By not pushing her to read aloud? Whatever it takes to instill a love of reading today will help a child love reading tomorrow. And a child who loves reading will want to learn to read. It’s foolproof! It just may not happen on our timetable.”

When it comes to activities like reading and writing, we parents sometimes get panicky. Especially if we’re homeschooling, and feel that we’re taking on the entire responsibility of making sure our kids learn these skills. (Skills? That’s a pretty icky, school-ish way to describe reading and writing. Even after years of trying to escape school-bound thinking, it still creeps in on me.) We worry that they’ll never learn to read if we don’t help them sound out words when they’re five; we hand-wring that they’ll never write if they don’t know how to compose a sentence by six. We get bogged down in the little steps: the sounding-out, the “word-attack” skills (sheesh!), the pencil grip, the grammar rules…

Our focus gets locked on these little steps, and what our child ought to be doing, and suddenly learning to read and write becomes a chore. We lose sight of the bigger picture.

If we want our kids to love reading and writing in the future, we have to help them love reading and writing today.

“If we want our kids to love reading and writing in the future, we have to help them love reading and writing today.”

So how do you get them to love reading and writing today?

This is where a little outside-the-box thinking comes in, and a little paying attention to your child. In the time you save not pushing phonics programs and grammar worksheets, you can be thinking about your singular, amazing child, and how to make reading and writing exciting in that child’s life. Today.

Loving reading today may not involve your child reading on his or her own at all. Loving reading today may mean listening to Magic Treehouse audiobooks, as Amy mentions. Loving reading today may mean scooping up easy readers from the library on your child’s favorite topics (who knew there were so many ballet and puppy-inspired books for young readers?), leaving them lying around, and then not nagging your child when she doesn’t pick them up. Loving reading today may mean coming home from the grocery store and sitting in the car in the garage, listening to just a little more of  The Great Brain audiobook with your kids, because the story is too good to turn off simply because you’ve arrived home.

Loving writing today may mean noticing that your son is writing online messages to the friends with whom he plays Lego Universe, and letting that be writing enough. It might mean encouraging letter and email-writing to friends, as my Indian blog-friend Rashmie does, or letting your son dictate a chart of Lego Ninjago characters like Carrie did with her son, and shared in the comments of my last post. Loving writing today might simply be the casual chat you and your son have about the crafty chapter titles Rick Riordan uses in the Percy Jackson series. It might involve no actual writing at all.

All of these small acts allow a child, un-pressured, to learn to respect and enjoy reading and writing. If they keep having meaningful, enjoyable experiences like these, they will, eventually, want to read and write themselves.

Here’s another way to put it. I always tell nervous parents of young kids something like this this: Your child will eventually find something that he’s dying to read. It might be a Magic card, or it might be a book about horses. And I promise, I really promise, your child will not want you taking dictation from her when she’s a teenager on Facebook. She’ll learn to write.

They will learn to read and write because they want to. This doesn’t mean that they’ll learn to read or write when you want them to. And that, of course, is the fly in the ointment.

You could try to push your timetable on your kids. (Your timetable is likely to be public education’s timetable. Ask yourself why that timetable must be the standard.) The trouble with inflicting one’s timetable on another is that it completely undermines the learning. In addition to learning whatever you’re trying to push, the child is also likely to learn that he or she dislikes reading and writing. Not good. Reading and writing are complicated pursuits! It would be wise to have your child’s internal motivation fueling the endeavor. Internal motivation is a mighty force, and one you want on your side for the ride. (Check out Alfie Kohn’s thoughts on how teachers can kill internal motivation when it comes to reading.)

This all makes sense in theory, right? Yet, it took me about ten years and three kids to really grasp the notion. I know I’ve written about this before (can’t find where) but I really pushed the school timetable on my oldest when it came to writing. I couldn’t shake what I’d done as a teacher, just a few years before. I expected him to do all of his own writing by the time he was six or seven, and I encouraged (read: required) him to write in different formats: nonfiction, persuasive, journalistic. I even expected him to recopy drafts when he was seven for no real reason other than that I expected it. Oh, I thought I was giving him a lot of freedom, letting him choose his own topics within my categories, letting him write silly stuff if he wanted to. Wasn’t enough. One day when he was seven, he swept a stack of papers off of the kitchen table in a rage, screamed, “I hate writing!” and stomped out of the room.

I was lucky with him. Writing and reading actually came fairly easily for H, and starting up a writer’s workshop for homeschoolers a few months later was all it took to make writing worthwhile to him, and to make him embrace it.

By the time it came to Lulu, I decided I’d do anything to keep her from hating writing. So I started taking dictation from her. (There’s a whole series of posts on the topic, if you’re new here.) Thing is, I always felt a little guilty about it, like she really ought to be writing herself. Still, it worked, and Lulu has always fancied herself a writer.

Mr. T is six years younger than his sister, and almost ten years younger than his brother. I started taking dictation from him when he was three or four, and began to recognize that not only were we having a fine time together, but T was learning an awful lot about writing, without writing a word himself. There are many posts on this, both in the dictation project series, and the writing with kids series. The bottom line is this: I never felt guilty that T wasn’t learning to write according to the public school timetable. Instead, I could recognize that I was raising a kid who loved having me put his words on the page, and who loved to talk about writing–both his own and the work of professional writers.

Guess what? At almost-ten, he often chooses to write on his own. But more often he chooses to have me write for him. What matters more to me is that regardless of who’s transcribing the letters, the kid values writing. He thinks it’s worthwhile and enjoyable. And that’s all he really needs to keep going.

There’s something about that first kid: it’s hard to keep your focus on today; there’s so much concern about where they’re headed, and whether you’re doing what you need to do to get them there. But once you’ve been through it before, it’s easier to trust in the process, and to enjoy what’s happening now. If you aren’t in the privileged place of having helped a child become a reader or a writer, I hope you can draw some faith from my story, and from the stories of other experienced parents, who never fail to kindly show up in the comments.

It will work out. In the meanwhile, have some fun with reading and writing today. Don’t know what I mean by fun? Let your kid help you figure that out!

What do you do when your kid saves his money to buy a month-long subscription to the Lego Universe online game, and wants to talk of nothing else?

You go with it.

You look through some almanacs together (another recent obsession) and talk about graphs and charts and brainstorm how Lego Universe might lend itself to an intriguing graph.

That’s when he decides that a chart of the universe’s Nexus Force would be a most excellent diversion.

So you set him up with a blank Creately project page and watch him go to town.

Mr. T and I discovered Creately a few weeks back, when he wanted to make a digital tree of the cat family. We searched for a drawing tool for making flowcharts and found some good links on two pages I linked to recently: the infographics post at Langwitches and Troy Hicks’ informational writing wiki.

Mr. T and I sat together, setting up the chart and figuring out how Creately worked. Before long he was working on his own, toggling back and forth between his chart and the felidae family page on Wikipedia, copying, pasting, linking boxes and choosing colors.

Click on the graph to see a larger image which you can zoom in on.

I never have been able to keep all of those leopards, cougars and mountain lions straight. I’ve never seen them all laid out in such a visual way. It’s a useful document, this thing my kid made.

(I wish I’d started T on a tool other than Creately. I had no idea how much he would take to the platform. It’s free for the first five graphs you make, but from then on you need to pay a monthly fee to use it, which doesn’t seem practical, given that we’d likely use it only sporadically.)

Back to that Lego Universe chart. This time T wanted to incorporate images, so I showed him how to do a Google image search, and how to save his finds to our desktop, and then import them into his chart. Do kids pick up on this stuff quickly? Only as quickly as they pick up a bottle of maple syrup when faced with a plate of pancakes.

This chart is also clickable.

Mr. T made another graph recently, this time by hand. This one came about during yet another recent fascination: The Avengers animated series, which he’s worked his way through on Netflix. One day, when he wouldn’t stop talking about Hawkeye, I showed him this page on Figment.com, of wacky charts based on the Harry Potter series.

Go look. The charts and graphs made us giggle. I love the notion that kids can take information from something they’re reading (or watching!) and analyze it with a sense of humor.

I asked T if he’d like to make a similar Avengers-themed chart, and he decided that it would be fun to note how much he liked the various characters throughout the episodes (inspired by Potter chart #3.)

(Click it!)

Once again, I was amazed by his tenacity with this project. He researched the name of every episode and transcribed them on his graph. (His idea, not mine.) I appreciate the home-spun, hand-drawn feel of it. He’s still planning to add more Avengers, and to go over all of the episode titles in pen. The graph has led to conversations about T’s likes and dislikes with the series, and the notion of character development. (What’s up with The Wasp anyway, and why does she get so boring as the season goes on?)

So, what has he learned from these projects?

• How to choose a topic that lends itself to a chart or graph.
• How to share information in a visual format, rather than with pure prose.
• How to research information.
• How to structure that information, in a visual that makes sense to the viewer.
• How to work with new platforms, such as Creately.
• How to import various media to his projects, and to toggle between web sources.
• The role of good design in visual projects. (Check out my thoughts on Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind to get a sense of why design is such an important skill for kids to acquire.)

All good stuff. In Mr. T’s mind, though, he was just having fun, exploring some of his current interests in a new way.

Who says you can’t learn from video games and cartoons? Instead of separating popular culture from what kids are learning, I’d argue that we ought to embrace it. I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll keep saying it until I’ve typed off the letters from my keyboard: kids learn best when you start with their interests. Which doesn’t mean that all of their learning has to be based on Thor or Lego space marauders.

But sometimes, it can.

Mr. T conducts research for a Lego-themed writing project. (Really!)

* * *

“90% of teens enjoy the writing they do outside of school, a figure that is consistent between boys and girls as well as older and younger teens.”

Writing, Technology and Teens, Pew Internet & American Life Project

Ninety percent. That’s a pretty impressive percentage. And when the Pew folks talk about “outside of school” writing they’re referring to traditional fare, such as journaling, letter-writing and poetry. That 90% doesn’t even include all the other writing mentioned in my last post: the texting, the profile and status updates on Facebook, the tweets. If you look at the mind-boggling statistics that littered that post, teens clearly enjoy that sort of writing too. (There’s some interesting conversation in the comments section of the post as well. Go read!)

As I pointed out there, these days teens value the written word. That’s big. It means that when it comes to teens and writing, parents–homeschooling and otherwise–and teachers have a hook.

We just have to pay attention to the writing formats that kids value, and start from there. What do text messages, blogs, Facebook walls and tweets have in common? They’re all writing aimed at an audience, and inviting response. Imbedded in the writing is the notion that someone will respond, and that, I’d argue, is what makes those formats compelling to teens (and to many adult writers as well.)

Traditional school writing, such as the rickety, follow-the-formula research paper, doesn’t have that motivating audience. Who’s the audience when it comes to school writing? Usually, a single teacher. For the purpose of a grade.

“Teens tend to enjoy the writing they do for personal reasons more than the writing they do for school. Half (49%) of teens enjoy the writing they do for themselves ‘a great deal,’ compared with just 17% who enjoy the writing they do for school with a similar intensity. In total, nearly one third of teens say they enjoy their school writing ‘not much’ (22%) or ‘not at all’ (10%).”

Writing, Technology and Teens, Pew Internet & American Life Project

So, how can you make kids’ “academic” writing as engaging as the writing they do on their own? You start with the formats kids are already using.

I’ve been reading The Digital Writing Workshop by Troy Hicks. In this book, Hicks offers chapter after chapter of possibilities for using digital media with kids’ writing. He shows how to set kids up with RSS feeds to follow topics of personal interest, how to help them use social bookmarking to keep track of information they want to remember, how to start them writing blogs, wikis and cooperatively-written texts. It’s a book written for classroom teachers, but I imagine it could be useful as well to a homeschooling parent, or a parent who wants to help a child find more writing options than he or she is being offered in school.

Need a more concrete example? Here’s a wiki written by Hicks, intended to be used by groups of kids when exploring a new nonfiction topic. As you can see, kids are linked to tools to help them create websites, infographics, instructional videos, timelines, maps and a bibliography using social bookmarking services.

A homeschooling family might use this wiki differently. They might start with a child’s existing interest, and then parent and child could explore some of these links together in search of a format that the child finds compelling. Mr. T and I did this last week. He’s been curious about the various species in the cat family and thought it might be fun to make some sort of chart on the topic. We looked at the infographic links and found a service for him to use. I helped him get started on the chart; eventually he was able to complete it on his own. We’re talking about the possibility of him starting a (password-protected) blog, so he can share future graphs and other projects with friends and family.

Infographics, in particular, are a hot means of sharing information these days, and provide a whole new format for visually-driven kids. What’s an infographic? Check out this one which I found last week via twitter, on videogames and education. Or look at this very thorough, informative post on Creating Infographics with Students at Langwitches. (Lots of other inspiration on using digital media in education there too.)

In my workshops for homeschooling parents, I encourage them (repeatedly!) to start with their children’s interests, and to consider the writing opportunities suggested by those interests. For instance, when H was a young teen and interested in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance series, he applied for and received a volunteer position writing for Shurtagal.com, the fansite for the series. H helped write an early wiki of terms and characters from the book. This was something he did almost entirely independent of me. Was it valuable writing instruction? Absolutely.

Likewise, starting at age eleven, Lulu held a volunteer position writing for the New Moon Magazine website, New Moon Girls. Her position involved not only writing content, but also “attending” online planning meetings conducted entirely via written chat. This was something that Lulu was highly motivated to do; it was also incredibly helpful in her development as a writer.

My role in both of these instances was simply to recognize that my kids were intrigued by these forums, and to encourage them to try to get involved. I helped both with their applications; they took over from there.

Does your child write in an online format? What? Where? Please leave a comment! Let’s chat about all the possibilities out there for kids.

Digital writing has so much potential–for kids to write independently, for kids to work in small groups. There’s just too much to cover in one post. Consider this a teaser. I hope to do some big bellyflops into specific digital topics here in the future.

Sadly, meanwhile, many schools still teach writing via formulaic, five-paragraph-essay-style assignments that are boring to write and even more boring to read. Which seems a shame in an era when kids are naturally engaged in other formats of writing. And in an era in which the ability to write is becoming more important than ever. One more quote:

“…two-thirds of principals in a recent survey said they believe their school is preparing students to be competitive in the global workforce. But most tech-savvy students didn’t share that view.”

Maya Prahbu, “’Digital Disconnect’ Divides Kids, Educators”, eSchool News

If these tech-savvy students didn’t learn their tech skills in school, where did they learn them? Most likely, they taught themselves. Likewise, many students will teach themselves how to write well, through the digital forums in which they participate. But wouldn’t it be nice if those same kids could take their enthusiasm for writing, and apply it to their coursework? If more teachers were like Troy Hicks, using kids’ interests and media that’s relevant to them as guiding principals of instruction?

Homeschoolers and other parents, you don’t have to wait for schools to come around. You can nurture this sort of writing education right now. Pay attention to your kids’ interests and open your mind to the writing possibilities. And then try to encourage. Ever so gently.

More to come.

“Today, students are doing an immense amount of writing—they’re blogging; they’re text messaging; they’re e-mailing; they’re updating their status messages, profile information, and live feeds on social networking and other sites; and others are “tweeting”… Perhaps most interesting in the midst of all this writing students are doing is that they don’t often call it ‘writing’. Writing, students note, is something they do in school. What they do with computers outside of school is something else.”

Because Digital Writing Matters, National Writing Project

It’s absolutely mind-boggling to consider how much kids write these days, especially pre-teens and teens. And yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard all the complaints about how texting is harming literacy, but anyone who thinks that way is missing the bigger picture. Kids these days are writing more on a daily basis than we, their parents, ever did. So much more.

They just don’t think of what they’re doing as “real” writing. And I think that many parents consider it even less real–or at least less worthwhile.

In 2008, the Pew Internet & American Life project put out a report called Writing, Technology and Teens which was based on interviews with 700 teens, and is chockablock with interesting stats on this topic.

Check out the most common forms of non-school writing reported by teens, followed by the percentage that have done the activity in the previous year:

Write notes or letters to other people (64%); write in a journal (34%); do short writing, from a paragraph to one page (31%); do creative writing, such as plays, poetry, fiction or short stories (25%); write music or lyrics (25%); create audio, video, PowerPoint or multimedia presentations (16%); write essays (8%); write computer programs (6%).

(Really? Eight percent of these kids wrote essays for fun in the last year? Oh I know, eight percent is practically statistically insignificant, but the fact that any kid might write an essay for kicks is enough to heat up my little essayist heart.)

What I find particularly interesting about this “non-school writing” list is that it’s topped by notes and letters to other people, yet the report writers chose not to include texting, emailing, social networking and IMing in the category of non-school writing. Those activities are examined in a separate section. Guess the Pew Internet & American Life folks don’t think of them as real writing either.

That, to me, is missing the point. All of those activities are writing, and I have to wonder why people feel a need to separate them. Because they’re more casual? Because correctness can be less important in their composition? Because kids enjoy this kind of writing, so it can’t possibly be worthwhile?

The basic fact is that teenagers today are communicating with each other in written words on a daily basis. According to a Nielsen report, 83% of teens text message, with the average number of teen texts going up 566% over two years, from an average of 435 texts per teen per month in 2007 to 2,899 texts per month in 2009! Another 2009 report by Pew Research states that 86% of teens “comment on a friend’s page or wall” while using social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Many people seem to assume that this sort of casual, social communication writing must be undermining kids’ school writing. Let’s try to tease that out by looking at the most recent NAEP Writing Assessment results. NAEP is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card. While I’m certainly no proponent of standardized testing as a way of measuring knowledge (or shaping schools for that matter), we may as well glance over the results, since a slew of kids had to endure the test.

The last writing results available were from 2007. (The test was administered again this spring, but those results won’t be available until next year. This year marked the first time the test was given via computer, which should make the results that much more interesting.) Some analysis of the 2007 test results from the National Center for Education Statistics:

“Some of the more notable findings of the 2007 assessment included the following: The improvement at grade 12 in writing, which we have not seen in some of the other subjects recently; the improvement among male students at both grades 8 and 12…”

“According to our 2007 results, the gap between male and female 12th-grade students is getting smaller. Twelfth-grade boys are improving their scores at a faster rate than 12th-grade girls.”

So. There’s an improvement in writing, which we have not seen in some of the other subjects recently. Just writing, eh? And the gap between twelfth-grade boys and girls is suddenly getting smaller. Huh.

Let’s talk about those twelfth-grade boys. Boys tend to disengage with literacy in high school. If you need proof and explanation of that claim, start with Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men by Michael W. Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm. Yet something has changed in those boys’ lives that’s made their scores come closer to the scores of teenage girls. Think it’s some new writing program that the schools are administering? Doubt it.

Consider the fact that the previous NAEP writing test had been administered in 2002. What could have possibly changed between 2002 and 2007?

Think about it. Let’s check in with those folks at Pew Research and their teen report “Tech Usage Over Time”. While Facebook didn’t even exist in 2002, by 2006, 84% of teens were posting comments to friends’ pages or walls. 41% of teens were sending daily messages to friends on Facebook or MySpace. And while teen texting was uncommon in 2002, by 2006, 27% of teens said they texted friends daily. Thirty percent sent daily instant messages to friends.

Then there’s gaming, which we’d better pay attention to if we’re talking teen boys. While video game play was already popular in 2002, daily use has increased over time, especially amongst boys. It hit a high in 2005, with teen boys spending an average of more than 40 minutes a day playing video games, compared with a female average of just seven minutes a day that same year. (There was a slight dip over the next few years, but the playing time seems to be back up again.) Parents may not realize how often video game players actually communicate with one another via writing, but write they do. (Edited to add: Not to mention all the posting to gaming forums that many players do, writing for advice as well as community.)

Written communication in the personal lives of teens was virtually transformed between 2002 and 2007. While I have no proof, I’d bet my sweet little 11-inch Macbook Air that this is why the writing scores went up in that 2007 test. Teens are writing more in their personal lives than they ever have before, and their resultant comfort with writing is creeping into their school/assessment writing. What they’re writing matters less than the fact that they are writing. Consider the 10,000 hour rule, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. You become good at anything by putting in the hours; 10,000 of them are likely to make you an expert. Kids are writing because they’ve found writing formats that matter to them–and therefore they’re getting better at it.

But why the closing of the gap between boys and girls in particular? As I mentioned above, boys traditionally have less engagement with literacy than girls by the time they reach their teens. Since girls’ outside-of-school writing has increased as well, you’d expect their scores to go up, which they did. But I’m guessing that many teen boys have, for the first time, found writing venues that interest them. So their scores have increased even more.

All that stuff that teens do with their phones and computers, described in the introductory quote, is real writing. The sad part is that only the most progressive educators recognize it. Schools (and homeschoolers for that matter) have an instant hook when it comes to literacy and teens. There are forms of writing that they like to do. We just have to figure out how to relate that writing to their more “academic” writing.

It’s all writing and it’s all real. More on that in my next post.

Ever wish you could hear me yammer on in person about the stuff I write about here? Uh, probably not. After all, in person it’s not so easy to click me closed when I’m too longwinded. Nevertheless, if you’ll happen to be in California, nearabouts Sacramento in early August, you’ll have your chance. I’ll be speaking at the annual HomeSchool Association of California conference, which runs from August 4-7.

I’ll even try to make it worth your while, so you won’t itch to click me quiet.

I’ll be offering two workshops at the conference. The first is on the topic of dictation, which I’ve rambled about on this blog, plenty. Here’s the description:

Dictation: The Writing Tool that has “Homeschooler” Written All Over It

Dictation simply means having one person write for another. It isn’t a method widely used in schools, simply because the adult-to-child ratio doesn’t allow it, but it’s an ideal way to approach writing for homeschoolers. Many kids dislike writing because learning the mechanics—spelling, grammar, penmanship and keyboarding—is an incredibly difficult, complex task that can take years to master. Dictation allows kids to develop their unique, vivid voices as writers from a very early age, while acquiring those mechanical skills gradually and naturally over time. It helps them enjoy the satisfaction of written self-expression without getting bogged down!  It’s also a helpful technique for older, reluctant writers, and for fluent writers who need help starting a challenging project.  In this workshop we’ll explore the role of dictation in a fun, child-centered approach to writing. We’ll discuss tips for how to take dictation successfully, and we’ll examine the advanced writing skills that kids can pick up painlessly, simply by dictating what they have to say to a willing, writing adult. Techniques shared in this workshop should be helpful to all manner of homeschoolers, from the more formal to the most radically unschooled.

The second workshop is a little quirkier. It’s based on the research that fascinated and sidetracked me for several months earlier this year:

Writing in the World, Writing in Schools—and The Implications for Homeschooled Writers

With our shifting technologies, writing is becoming more important than ever in our world. Literacy researcher Deborah Brandt writes, “For perhaps the first time in the history of mass literacy, writing seems to be eclipsing reading as the experience of consequence.” Yet at the same time, largely due to the current climate of standards and testing, most schools are giving writing short shrift. Progressive writing educators are calling for a writing revolution, saying that students need to write more often, with more freedom, about what matters to them, and in the formats that they’re using outside of school. Sounds a lot like what we homeschoolers do already, doesn’t it? In this workshop, we’ll begin by looking at the research to gain a better understanding of writing’s status in the world and in schools. Then we’ll explore how we homeschoolers are in an excellent position to encourage exciting, profound, child-centered writing experiences for our kids—all kids, from the youngest through the teens. Together, we’ll brainstorm ways to turn your child’s personal interests into meaningful, engaging writing. If you’ve ever worried that your child might learn to write better in a classroom setting, come to this workshop and prepare to be surprised.

I’m not sure this second description quite captures what I hope to do in this workshop. I’m afraid the talk of research and schools might scare off folks, and I sure hope more than three or four show up because, dang, I’m excited about this one! It’s a topic that speeds up my heart and my speech. I wasn’t really sure why I got so caught up with what’s happening with writing in schools, when I’m trying to write a book on writing for homeschoolers, but ultimately it was the recommendations of progressive writing educators that brought it all home for me. They’re begging teachers, administrators and policy makers to do what we homeschoolers do already. Let kids write about their passions! Find writing formats that kids are internally driven towards! So many homeschooling parents have fears about their kids and writing–I’m hoping to convince them that we have the freedom to give our kids the kind of writing education that won’t make it into most classrooms for years. Kid-centered, interest-driven writing is what will make writers of our kids. And, according to Deborah Brandt, these days we all need to be writers.

So if you can, come see me yatter! I’ll do my best to get your heart beating faster too. I’ll be speaking on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Full conference schedule here. If you’re local and you’ve never been to the conference, it’s worth a try–even if you go for just one day.

Planning for these workshops is sort of heady stuff for summertime. Lest you think I’m not working at my summer list, I leave you with photos to prove otherwise.

My foothill home companion, cherry-picking and photo-taking.

Cherry clafoutis.

Knitting in sand.

Girls on beaches.

Boys on boats.

Fireworks over lakes.

Homemade Bakesale Batty fried chicken sandwiches under pines. (Mine had fried zucchini.)

County fair. 99 cent day, 99 degrees.

What’s keeping you busy so far this summer?

I can never resist a web link about creativity. Clicked on this one recently, about a creativity experiment with undergrads based on thinking like a kid. What interested me more than the experiment was this analysis of it:

From The Frontal Cortex:

Why does age make us less mature? Why accounts for the infamous 4th grade slump in creativity? One possibility is that we trade away the ingenuity of our youth for executive function. As the brain develops, the prefrontal cortex expands in density and volume. As a result, we’re able to exhibit impulse control and focused attention. The unfortunate side-effect of this cortical growth is an increased ability to repress errant thoughts. While many of these thoughts deserve to be suppressed, it turns out that we also censor the imagination. We’re so scared of saying the wrong thing that we end up saying nothing at all.

I had an experience during my teaching days that illuminated that 4th grade slump for me. One year, we had a program in which pairs of teachers visited classes throughout our elementary school, facilitating an activity based on a famous artist. Usually I taught third grade, but for two days I got to teach art in every grade, from kindergarten through sixth.

It was the second grade classrooms that stunned me.

There were two of them in our school, and they were filled with artists. The kids jumped into our Matisse project with glee. They made bold lines, they used lots of color. They didn’t ask questions; they just sprawled across their pages and poured themselves on to them. And then they cried for us teachers to come see what each of them had created.

I couldn’t believe that the kids were just a year younger than my third graders. Already, the third grade kids were doubtful when it came to art. They asked lots of questions. They dawdled. They crumpled papers. They hid them. Most of the kids still seemed to enjoy art once they got going, but they didn’t leap in, with joy and without reservation, as the second graders had. It wasn’t just my third grade class; the other third grade at the school was the same way. (The school’s kindergarten and first graders were avid artists as well. But as a third grade teacher, it was those second graders that captivated me. How could so much creative drive get lost in the course of a year?)

If I’d just watched a single second grader work, and a single third grader, I wouldn’t have realized the magnitude of the difference. It was the palpable change in creative energy between the second grade and the third grade classrooms that was impossible not to notice.

And the fourth graders? That was the end of it all. Many of those kids had pretty much given up on art, and simply made half-hearted scrawls on the page. There were still a handful of artists in the room, but it wasn’t a roomful of artists. It was a little heartbreaking.

All of this got me thinking about one of my theories about taking dictation from kids. If you’re newer to this blog, you may have missed my posts about dictation. I’m not talking about dictation in the Charlotte Mason sense, but dictation in the secretarial sense. In other words, writing down what kids want to say. You can read much more in my series of posts, The Dictation Project. Or here it is in a nutshell: Dictation is a fantastic, underused tool for helping kids learn to write. By simply transcribing  for them for a few years, you can help them develop their writing voices while they simultaneously learn the mechanics of writing–slowly, organically and painlessly.

Dictation is especially effective, I think, because it helps kids express themselves on paper while they’re still young and, well, expressive. The creative energy that bubbled in those kindergarten, first and second grade classrooms isn’t limited to art. The kids speak with the same unbounded joy and imagination. All we adults have to do is transcribe those words to see the vivid, original writer already living within the child appear on the page.

Here’s the sad irony: if we wait for kids to become proficient writers to translate their unique voices to the page, it might be too late. Because guess how long it takes to develop from being a beginning writer to becoming a fluent one? One who doesn’t have to think much about letter formation, spelling and grammar, who can focus on the thoughts at hand? I don’t have a scientific, proven answer, but experience tells me that it tends to take three or four years. Might happen faster for homeschoolers who start later, and surely it happens faster and slower for different individuals, but I’d say that three or four years is a pretty good average.

Calculate that. If kids start writing at five or six, when will they become fluent writers who can fairly easily transcribe what they want to say? That’s right. Their writing skills will come together right in time for the 4th grade slump. Right when, quite possibly, their prefrontal cortexes are becoming distracted with new functions, and beginning to censor the imagination.

If you don’t think this is an issue, pick up any book for adults who want to write. There will nearly always be a chapter on voice. A chapter trying to show adult writers how to find their own unique styles. How to put their personalities on the page. Such a chapter is almost always there because voice is so important in writing. It’s a big part of what engages a reader. Yet many of us make it to adulthood without any sense of our voices as writers. It isn’t something cultivated in traditional English classes.

But young kids already have voices! Quirky, expressive voices—each and every one of them! They just don’t yet have the skills to put those words to the page at any length. Dictation helps young writers discover their voices and develop them, long before the 4^th grade slump hits. Which makes it much easier to hold on those voices as their brains move on to new skills.

My youngest is nine. If he went to school, he’d be a fourth grader this fall. Which gives me pause. This kid has an endless imagination; the notion that his prefrontal cortex might start getting sidetracked by “impulse control and focused attention” gives me pangs. I’d always thought that dwindling creativity had more to do with peer pressure than anything else, and that homeschooling might help prevent it. I still believe that, to a degree. But I suppose I can no more stop T’s brain from changing than I can stop the sea from sending in waves.

At least his writing voice is intact. The kid is a storyteller, and no future crank of a teacher with a red pen will ever drive that out of him. Phew.