Why This Mom Treasures a Writing Program

Institute for Excellence in Writing has been a Knight in Shining Armor to this mother of three boys! I know from experience being around other children that our three boys have what might even be termed "verbal gifts"--perhaps sometimes in excess. But they are still boys. Boys do not like to write. Or maybe I should say that boys do like writing but would prefer to do anything else except write, if given the opportunity. Baseball calls. The green golf course beckons. Pencils are a thrall around the neck of a boy's desire for wide open spaces and the free exercise of their Outside Voices. Or, as Andrew Pudewa, the Atascadero-based commander in chief of IEW would say, "Boys know that the Whole Point of Life is to build forts."

So how did I, one lone mother in a sea of requests for special non-writing dispensations and the doleful pleas of writing callouses, manage to pull off not one, but TWO, reports on colonial life in two short weeks? The answer is in the IEW curriculum's sequential checklist format, its practice-until-you-master-it mentality, and its refusal to go the open-ended blank page creative writing route of most curricula. In week one, both Brandt and Gresham checked out several sources from the library children's section (research skills too!) Then they read the sources to one another while I made dinner in an entirely different room! Please don't tell anyone that I left my homeschooled children unattended. In so doing, the boys each collected their own key word outline of useful and most interesting facts about their topics (colonial travel and colonial houses). From this key word outline, they wrote one sentence after another until they ran out of facts. Then the paragraph was done. Whew! Did I really expect them to write THREE paragraphs? And how!

Thus far we're in Week 9 of our Classical Conversations-based IEW program. The "dress-ups" introduced to the children are
1. A quality adjective
2. An -ly word (adverb)
3. A strong verb
4. A who/which clause (adjectival clause)

The sentence openers introduced to this point are
1. A very short sentence
2. An adverbial (-ly) opener
3. A prepositional phrase opener

My goodness, are we learning English grammar too? Why didn't I ever hear the word "adverbial" before I was 35?

Because these dress-ups and openers are introduced gradually and practiced in every single paragraph every single week, my boys are finally to the point where they know how to find the better word choices and the clearer clauses and phrases for themselves. In the first week, their assignments were twice the work for me as for them. We literally spent HOURS every day trying to write what I began to think of as "That Insufferable Poem About America." My husband taught the writing one morning while I was at the dentist and claimed it was "the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life (F-15 training notwithstanding)." I have to admit secretly that the dentist was a decent excuse for a break that week. But that front-loaded work of explaining over and over again is now paying dividends.

Another step we took from the beginning was to write in a notebook our own collection of quality adjectives, strong verbs, -ly words and rousing nouns. While the boys often fail to find the word they're needing in these collections, I find that the suggestions get their writing genes up and stretching. At this point, I still answer PLENTY of their questions--but they're along the following lines: "Is it okay to put a prepositional phrase here?" or "Is this an adjectival clause?" or "Do I put a 'who' or a 'which' after this noun?" Compare these questions to the statements of desolate boys facing a blank page of creative "leaders:" "I don't know what to write." "This is dumb." "I have a writing callous from that last baseball game." And now you see why I've been prompted to wax eloquent over the idea of a writing program.

Additionally, the boys have learned how to formulate a topic sentence and restate it at the end of the paragraph in a "clincher." You may notice some of the clumsier attempts in the writing samples I plan to publish here over the next week. You will probably chuckle at the dressiness of some of the dress-ups ("They tied the thrilled horse to the post." Yes, it was in fact a "strong adjective.") However, a 'tween girl never learns how to expertly apply her makeup without some initial clumsy attempts involving glitter and blue eyeshadow, right?