Brave writer reviews 7 how to#

The Wand is a thin supplement of mostly copywork and narration exercises for K-2nd grade.

The Writer’s Jungle is just a book (though bound in a big binder if you buy the hard copy) about the philosophy of the program, though it contains lots of examples, assignments and even schedules.

So to help you out, here’s what I now understand are the purchasable elements that I figured out: It does go on sale at HSBC periodically, helping ease the price a good bit. However, other curriculum authors do the same for much, much less. They support the program and Julie Bogart says she emails with parents constantly. It’s very expensive for a program that relies on you as the parent to do so much of the planning and implementing. And I’ll just say from the get go that despite how much I am liking this, I don’t know that I can justify the expense at all. It’s scaffolding, not cheating!īefore I go any further, let me tell you that I had heard about Bravewriter, looked at the website, and not been able to figure out what in the world you were even buying if you purchased it.

Don’t confuse revision with editing for mechanics.

Getting kids to write about what they’re passionate about is important, but giving them vague open-ended assignments isn’t the way to do it (as in, “write about your favorite…” kinds of assignments, which make kids feel at sea about what to do).

Creating a language-rich environment by reading good books and appreciating words is more important that doing grammar lessons for making good writers.

(Having taught some abysmal teen writers who were able to turn around and write solid, if not award-winning, essays, I always used to believe this and somehow lost sight of it in the last three years.)

It can all be fixed later in the teen years.

Believe your child will be able to write.

Be your child’s ally and supporter for writing.

Create routines, not schedules (Advice I’ve always followed and given in regards to practically every other aspect of homeschooling! Why was this so hard to envision for writing and language arts?).

I’m still such a jumble of thoughts, that I’m just going to list some of the notes I’ve jotted down as I read her book and listened to her talk. The end goal of the Bravewriter program is to create kids who like writing, aren’t intimidated by it and have lifelong writing skills, which are not necessarily the same as academic writing skills. It made me feel more confident in my kids, myself, and in my end goals, which are much more in keeping with Bravewriter’s goals, than any other method or curriculum with which I’ve flirted. The Writer’s Jungle is exactly that book I was looking for that would make me feel about teaching writing the way good books about writing make me feel about writing itself. Practically everything Julie Bogart said in her talk and her book is either stuff I used to believe, say and do or new ideas that really resonated with me. I had looked at Bravewriter before and couldn’t figure it out (more on that if you scroll down a little ways) and it’s not cheap enough to just try, so it remained something I had heard was good, not something I knew anything much about. Julie Bogart is the author of The Writer’s Jungle, which is the foundation of the Bravewriter program. Can I just say, I think I have a little homeschool crush on her now.

Yet every time I tried to read anything, it either didn’t resonate with my experiences as a writer or as a writing teacher or it made me want to throw things.Īnd then, a little more than a week ago, I heard Julie Bogart speak. What I really wanted was a book or a curriculum that would make me feel about teaching writing the way something like Bird by Bird or If You Want to Write makes me feel about writing itself. There were a lot of things I had believed that I wasn’t even sure were true anymore. I saw, after fighting it for ages, that copywork, narration and dictation were useful for the kids, but I couldn’t fit them into any larger philosophical framework that satisfied me.

I knew that there were some resources that we had tried or looked at that I didn’t like and a few that I did. I honestly was at the point where I didn’t know what in the world I thought. I had to teach my own young children to write.Īnd slowly, over the course of the last three years, I’ve become more and more at sea.

Brave writer reviews 7 how to#

And having written and taught writing at the secondary level for years, I had some opinions about writing – how to teach it, what was really important, what my philosophy was and so forth. If you know me, you know I’m incredibly, annoyingly opinionated.