Hi Alicia! Be encouraged, there is still plenty of time to teach these skills. Here are some ideas:
Take off of some other subjects and do a writing intensive month. Have your high schoolers write an essayish type paper every day. Have your youngers write according to their ability and age. After this month is up, you can just have your highschoolers write an essayish paper once a week and keep your little ones writing a bit every day-nothing crazy, just a short narration or do free writing exercises. Look those up if you are unfamiliar with them. I used Hands On Essays to teach the essay format to my daughter and it was quick, easy and inexpensive.
Another option would be to start your children in grades 3-6 on daily written narrations and have your middle schoolers, and even writing phobic high schoolers, use Jump In writing curriculum from Apologia. It starts at the beginning and walks the student through every step of the writing process in a doable and interesting way. Then they can move on to the high school program-The Power In Your Hands. These two books will cover all the types of writing they will need for life and college.
You could also start the whole family on the Institute for Excellence in Writing.
We cover grammar very informally in our homeschool. It’s up to you how in depth you want to go but I woudn’t let it stress you out!
Here’s what I did with my son who is now graduated. He hated to write and I finally started him on IEW around the 6th grade or so. Once he went through the original program, I had him write across the curriculum for the remainder of his homeschool years. He wrote one paper a week, working on it each day and perfecting it and printing it out on Fridays.
With my daughter, who is now a rising 11th grader, I used written narrations through late 7th, early 8th grade. Then we skimmed through the Hands On Essays program I mentioned above and had a writing intensive month where she wrote an essay every, single day. She also used The Power In Your Hands for a few months but then chose to go back to writing across the curriculum. Now she is required to turn in one finished essay a week and she chooses to complete the whole process in one day instead of spreading it out through the week as her brother did. I plan on having her do one good research paper before graduation and we will also briefly cover the literary analysis paper.
Don’t worry! Take a deep breath. You can do this! 🙂
Blessings,
Melanie
