Write From History

I have the Ancient History book that I am starting now. I had the ebook and had put it aside because I didn’t have enough toner to print it out (400 pages or so). Now that I printed it out and we have used it a few days it seems nice.

I think I could put something like this together myself, but if you want something ready made, this is great.

The kids read a short story on Monday and do oral and written narrations. Tues they do copy work from the story and Wednesday they do a studied dictation from a different part of the story. Thursday is a new short story with oral narration and copy work. Friday is studied dictation from another part of the story introduced on Thursday.

I like it that the stories are fairly short. They work well for narration practice.

I don’t know if I will use it all the way through. We are also doing Spelling Wisdom and Queen’s. I just thought I would have it on hand and throw it in for a few weeks to shake things up a bit.

This looks like what I need.

Is there anything like this for 8th grade?

I really need to find a program for writing.

We loved Write With the Best, my daughters worked their way through both volumes and their writing improved dramatically.  They were always good solid writers, but this really changed the way they wrote and gave them a lot of confidence.  It covers grades 3-12 and teaches descriptive writing skills in 9 different genres, it covers some literary critique, some grammar and some proofreading – it is written to the student,  Each lesson takes 15-45 minutes depending on age of student. I highly recommend this, there are things that could be improved, like the answers. where the child has to mark the nouns etc in different colored pens, then at the back there is a list of words they should have highlighted.  It would have been easier, if the author, had highlighted a copy as it should look instead of having us waste time searching for the words in the passage, however that is a very minor criticism of a worthwhile program.  We still use the method for writing in other parts of our curriculum.  You can download both volumes to print at home from the Write With the Best website http://www.edupress.com.  Linda

Marsha, I don’t know about anyone else, but if you have an 8th grader, you could easily start the program now.  Write With the Best is a course written to be used as a semester course, however you can also spread it out an use over a year per volume, so it can either be a year course for both volumes or a two year course for two volumes.  We spread it out over 2 years, and gave ourselves lots of time, to do extra writing through the curriculum.  It depends on the skill of the student as to how quickly you can go through each lesson, and I don’t ever think that writing should be rushed – that is why I liked this course because it teaches mastery.  We also used it to write on our other subjects like history and science as well.  The only extra things you need are a dictionary and a thesaurus and maybe an English handbook for reference.  You could use it daily or as many days a week that you want.  Each lesson  is scheduled to be done about every 10 days, however, it is extremely flexible and there were times we used it daily and others where we used it three times a week.  I used to let the girls take there time so our writing lessons did go about 45 minutes – but it is entirely up to ypu and your student how to use it.  Maybe you could try it daily, get a feel for how it goes and then adapt as you go along.  The author recommends mastering each lesson before moving onto the next and she gives suggestions for other passages to use for extra practise.  As this course is good for 3-12th grade, I would do it now, and see how it goes.  If your child does not have great experience in writing, don’t follow age go with skill, meaning work through the easier volume 1 and master that prior to moving onto the more difficult volume 2 – we did both, because I wanted the girls to have the complete program and we did it over 2 years.  If you have any other questions, please ask.