Secular Curriculum Review: IEW’s Student Writing Intensive

IEW’s Student Writing Intensive is a practical, step-by-step writing curriculum that works great for kids who think they hate writing.

When my husband and I decided to homeschool our children, I thought writing would be a cinch to teach. I still think it would be, if I had a kid who was like me when I was a child — a child who was always writing. Growing up, I wanted to write poetry, stories, novels, you name it. And I never balked at a writing assignment.

Many people say that the secret to getting kids to write is to let them write whatever they want, and you can even take dictation for them, if you want. I think that’s good advice for a lot of kids, but my son is different. He doesn’t have any interest in writing anything. If I told him to write whatever he wanted, that would cause him anxiety and not make writing fun.

For a long time I wondered how I could teach him good writing skills without making him hate writing. This is something that I’ll be thinking about every year — how to move forward in a way that’s right for him. Fortunately, this year, I found something to get started with that’s working well. It’s the Institute for Excellence in Writing’s Student Writing Intensive Level A, which is for 3rd-5th graders. Levels B and C are available for higher grades. (Note that you can pair this with their Teaching Writing: Structure and Style, which is a 14-hour DVD Seminar for teachers and much more comprehensive. However, for the sake of this review, I’m writing about the Writing Intensive as a stand-alone curriculum.)

I’ll tell you right up front that I would not recommend this curriculum, if you have a child who enjoys writing. While all kids might benefit and learn something from it, I think it is especially made for kids who don’t have any idea what to write about or how to get started. I’m about halfway through the curriculum with my son right now.

It comes with a set of DVDs, and your child can watch the videos as if he’s sitting there in the classroom, listening to the teacher explain the concepts to a group of students. It begins by teaching students how to create a keyword outline for a paragraph that’s included in the lesson. Basically, he has to pick the three most important words in each sentence. Next, using this outline, he’ll write his own paragraph without looking at the original one. This has taken away the angst of “what am I supposed to write?” that was the first hurdle my son needed to get over.

Subsequent lessons are similar. All the lessons provide a pre-written text to create an outline with, but they add in “dress-ups” that the student needs to include in their paragraphs. Some of the dress-ups include a who/which clause, a strong verb, quality adjective, a because clause, etc. It’s slowly building a toolbox of writing mechanics that will help a child make her writing more varied and interesting. After doing these exercises with short, non-fiction paragraphs, it moves on to longer short stories and teaches students how to write a Story Sequence Chart. I can see where after doing these exercises with pre-written texts and re-writing them in his own words, my son may gain confidence in his writing ability and this will later free him up to begin some of his own, original writing. So far, I’ve been happy with it.

However, I have a few, small issues with this curriculum. First of all, some of the paragraphs he’s been using at the beginning of this curriculum should be proofread a little more closely. I have found more than one poorly written sentence. I always tell my son what is wrong with it, but for a parent who doesn’t have strong writing skills, I see this could be a problem. I feel a writing curriculum should offer excellent writing examples, though I also tell my son that this gives him a chance to write the paragraph better. 

I also have a problem with forcing the student to use one of each dress-up in their paragraph. While I see the benefit of repetition so that the student becomes more comfortable with the using these sentence structures, and I love how it reinforces grammar skills, forcing every dress-up does not always make the best writing, especially in a short paragraph. 

I have dealt with this issue by explaining to my son the purpose of these exercises. I told him that his writing will sound better if he varies the length and type of his sentences. He should try his best to use the dress-ups, but if they don’t serve the writing by making it sound better, he doesn’t have to do it. I go over his work with him, and I make suggestions, if I see a way to do it, but I don’t make him, for example, include a who/which clause into his writing, if I feel what he wrote without one is good writing.

This Student Writing Intensive offers some tips for kids that have been great for my son as well. The first one is that he’s only allowed to write with a pen. This takes away the urge to stop and erase and make the writing perfect the first time. The rough draft does not need to be perfect, and he’s learning proofreading marks to make corrections. The other tip that this curriculum offers is that a parent should be a walking dictionary for the child, telling him how to spell any word he doesn’t know. This takes a lot of angst out of writing that first draft too.

Overall, I like how this curriculum is helping my son put words on paper in a way that is not making him hate writing. It is a very formal program, which doesn’t work for every child, but if you have a child who has no interest in putting words on paper and/or likes having a “toolbox” to work with, it might be worth looking at.

If you use one of the Student Writing Intensives, IEW also offers continuation courses. I’m not sure whether that will be the right next step for my son, however. We’ll see when we get there.

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Secular Science Curriculum Review: Microbiology

Big questions and lots of points of entry make this curriculum great for middle school science.

If you ask any homeschooler what the hardest subject to homeschool as kids get older is, we’re probably all going to mention science. For one thing, secular science curriculum is hard to find — I know I am not the only person who’s been surprised in a bad way by a curriculum that seemed fun until it suggested that evolution was “just” a theory. For another, good science curriculum has to cover a lot of bases: It needs to provide facts, preferably in a fun and engaging way; it needs to guide students through labs and activities that are genuinely homeschool-possible — most of us won’t have multi-station labs in our dining rooms; and it needs to build understanding through asking questions, reinforcing key concepts, and encouraging curiosity. There are a lot of programs that do some or all of this for elementary students, but by middle school, the options are few and far between. So I am happy to report that there’s a great new option for middle school science that does all of these things: Blair Lee’s Microbiology.

Microbiology is the study of all the tiny living things that make up the world around us: bacteria, viruses, microscopic fungi, protozoa, algae, and archaea — all the things we need a microscope to get a good look at. Kids who plan to study biology and chemistry in high school will benefit from this deep dive into the microscopic science of life. And it really is a deep dive: Each of the 12 chapters includes a variety of access points for students, including informational text to introduce big ideas, videos (created specifically for the course) to illustrate important concepts, labs that encourage students to get hands-on with scientific modeling, problem sets to practice concepts, and discussion and writing questions to push students to explain their understanding and develop their own ideas. Because there are so many ways to engage with the information, it’s easy to adjust lessons to meet your child wherever they are.

The best part about this curriculum is the author’s obvious love for her subject. She thinks microbiology is super-cool, and kids can’t help but be caught up in her enthusiasm. I’m a big fan of science curriculum that operates more like an incubator for inspiring big thinking than a checklist of things to memorize, so I especially appreciated the way each chapter is centered around exploring questions rather than just learning answers. 

I think this curriculum hits the middle school science sweet spot: Microbiology steers kids toward big questions and interrogative science investigations while still providing lots of scaffolding and hands-on fun. It’s designed as a one-semester class, but you could easily stretch it to a full year by adding some books. (I’d start with A Planet of Viruses or I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, both of which make great readalouds.) Though the microscope labs for this course are optional, I think it’s worth investing in a microscope to get the full experience — consider teaming up with other homeschoolers to purchase a microscope for your co-op or homeschool group if several of you are looking for science resources. Microbiology feels like a just-right stepping stone between elementary school introduction to biology and high school-level biology classes.

A great science class reminds students that science isn’t something that’s just a list of facts to memorize but an ongoing process of discovery we can all participate in. Science is never “finished” because we’re always discovering new things. Microbiology is a vivid, compelling reminder that everybody who studies science IS a scientist. 

Blair is a friend of home/school/life and of this reviewer, but that relationship has not affected my opinion of Microbiology. 

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Secular Homeschool Curriculum Review: Philosophy for Kids

Philosophy for Kids: 40 Fun Questions That Help You Wonder About Everything!

By White, David

Buy on Amazon

Philosophy for Kids: 40 Fun Questions That Help You Wonder about Everything!

Recommended for: Middle School

Four hundred years ago, French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne asked society a thoughtful question: “Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?”

Tuned-in parents and educators would agree that children are natural philosophers. As a group, young people are highly inquisitive, imaginative, wide-open thinkers. With enthusiasm, they constantly seek opportunities to develop a sense of self and an understanding of the world they inhabit. On many levels, children wrestle, just as philosophers do, with questions of morality, social justice, and human understanding. Oftentimes, they attempt this without a proper context in which to frame their questions.

Even an elementary understanding of philosophy provides the tools our kids need to question and evaluate ideas constructively. Philosophy teaches how to conduct organized and civilized debate. It cultivates appreciation and under- standing of diverse thoughts, and opinions and grows its students into responsible, empathetic, articulate world citizens. Philosophy, it seems, aims to achieve the very goals so many of us aspire to reach each day in our own homeschools.

Philosophy, and the thought-provoking discussions this subject inspires, can lead to deeply satisfying exchanges between you and your child. Fortunately for us, Prufrock Press has published an excellent resource to help families get started — David A. White’s Philosophy for Kids: 40 Fun Questions That Help You Wonder About Everything.

White has been teaching philosophy in colleges and universities since 1967, but clearly he understands the value of providing philosophical understanding to much younger students as well. Written for children ages 10 and older, Philosophy for Kids might also appeal to younger, highly motivated learners who enjoy engaging with thinking of this kind.

Philosophy for Kids is divided into four sections: values, knowledge, reality, and critical thinking. Each of these sections receives a brief overview from the author and is linked to a specific branch of philosophy — ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and logic. Only one page in length, these introductions set the stage for a series of compelling problems for readers to ponder.

Each of the four sections is accompanied by a series of 10 units that open with questions such as “How do you know who your friends are?,” “Do you perceive things as they are or only as they seem to be?,” “If many people believe that something is true, is it true?,” and “Do you have free will?”. The first 29 questions in these units are connected to the work of a great philosopher. Kids will have fun deciding if they agree with such thinkers as Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates and will also love defending their own divergent beliefs.

To help learners consider all angles of each issue, White provides various exercises that include true or false and multiple choice questions as well as the chance to rank ideas according to the reader’s individual ideology. Although this traditional approach might sound dry to some homeschoolers, in this context the approach works well. The questions are entertaining, fun to wrestle with, and relevant.

Each short lesson closes with a section called “For Further Thought,” providing opportunities for students to delve deeper with more questions and activities. In one unit students are asked, “Can another person understand your feelings?” After completing several exercises addressing this question, students proceed to the “For Further Thought” section to consider “Is language the best way to express our emotions? Would the arts of music or painting represent emotions more vividly and truly? Select a work of music or art and analyze whether or not this work expresses emotions better than language.”

Additional ideas of great writers, mathematicians, orators, poets, and playwrights pepper the pages of this book and are wonderful aids for launching further thoughtful conversations.

The final 60 pages or so of Philosophy for Kids provide teaching tips, a glossary of terms, and helpful suggestions for further reading. Here White’s writing is as straightforward and pleasant to read as the rest of the book. With minimal effort, parents are able to glean excellent suggestions to enhance and facilitate meaningful discussion.

Whether your family chooses to work through this book chronologically or prefers instead to skip around to those questions of greatest interest, it makes no difference. A particularly fun aspect of a curriculum such as this is that it does not have to be a presented using a traditional format. If you like, simply use the material to foster deeper dinner time conversation or to pass time on a long car ride. However you choose to work with the book, your child will likely develop a new approach to critical thinking and have a terrific time in the process!

Philosophy for Kids could easily be adapted for use with one student or with many. I can imagine using this in a homeschool co-op with great results. Although a student could work through this book alone, I suspect an interactive approach would be preferable and loads more fun.

Very little preparation is required to use this book effectively in a homeschool. Parents may wish to read ahead to obtain a better command of the information. However, opening the book and reading it for the first time aloud with your child is absolutely fine. The book is a solid resource that is thorough enough to stand on its own. Especially enthusiastic students might enjoy supplementing with parts of the original texts cited throughout the book or with biographical information about featured philosophers. On average, expect a typical discussion to last 30 minutes or so.

In the introduction of his book, White writes of his desire to “foster a sense of wonder and to aim it in many directions.” It is my belief that the author achieves exactly what he set out to do. Taking subject matter that many might initially find intimidating, White presents philosophy as highly relevant, playful, challenging and fun.

Bottom line: Philosophy for Kids is a thought-provoking resource that will appeal to curious learners who enjoy puzzling over life’s mysteries. As a parent, you are likely to gain new insight into the wonderful ways that your child views the world as you delve into fascinating new subject matter together. 

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