When You Hate to Teach Your Student Compositional Writing [Show]

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Gretchen Roe: 00:00:05.219
Welcome to The Demme Learning Show. Our mission here is to help families stay in the learning journey wherever it takes them. This bonus episode was previously recorded as a webinar and was not created with the audio listener in mind. We hope you will find value in today’s episode.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:22.143
Hello, everyone. My name is Gretchen Roe, and it’s my very great pleasure to welcome you today to this webinar about when you hate to teach compositional writing. I have to tell you, I’m really excited about this subject. This is something I truly understand and enjoy, and I recognize that that probably puts me in the minority of homeschool parents. My husband and I homeschooled 6 children, 21 years. Five of them are now college graduates, and the last one is a senior in high school. I am joined today by my esteemed colleague Jody Scott, and I’ll let Jody introduce herself.

Jody Scott: 00:01:02.487
Hello, everyone. I am Jody, as she said, and I am the mother of six, and we have homeschooled all of them, all the way through. We’re on our last. He is graduating in two years. And I actually taught writing in a co-op for several years. And I love writing. I love teaching writing. I love holding Mom’s hands during the process. So I’m so excited to talk about this. I’m also an evaluator here in Pennsylvania, and so I get to see a lot of writing across the board from a wide variety of students.

Gretchen Roe: 00:01:45.963
And that makes Jody’s participation today extra special because she has both ends of the equation as well. I taught compositional writing for 15 out of the 21 years that I homeschooled in a co-op and enjoyed it very thoroughly. And I find it so interesting because I’m not a mathematician. And so I had to find my way to Demme Learning and math, you see, before I got even marginally comfortable with mathematics and my homeschool students. But with writing, I felt that was something that I could accomplish, and it’s not always that way. I attend 15 to 18 homeschool conferences a year, and when I talk to homeschool parents, this is right up there with public speaking as far as things you hate. And so, we wanted to talk today about how to make this more comfortable. So where we want to begin is really to talk about how you feel about compositional writing, and really what are you saying in your household. And Jody has some good commentary about that, so I’ll let her talk about how it’s important for us to frame in the affirmative for our parents how writing is happening.

Jody Scott: 00:03:07.132
Sure. Well, I know that in my household, I had to be very careful how I spoke about math because I was passing on to my kids my math phobias. And we do that without thinking, right? Because we dread the subject. The way we teach it is with that dread. So we kind of need to work through and get past our own issues with writing or math, whatever it might be. But in this case, writing, so that we can have that fresh, clean slate with our kids. And we may have little writers that we really want to encourage. And we’re all going to be communicating we’re all communicators in life. So writing is essential. And we can get past your writing hurdles too. I know that I was never– I was always kind of a hesitant writer. I started teaching writing in the co-op because no other mom would volunteer. And I wanted it for my children. So I’m like, okay. And I kind of had that suck it up buttercup type of mentality. But I’m like, “Okay, I’ll do this.” But then in the midst of training and really poring over it because I knew I was going to be teaching 16 kids, I really renewed my mind in the process of actually teaching it to a lot of other children and moms that didn’t want to volunteer to teach it. And I had the moms in the classroom as well, and it really helped to go through it with our kids, even doing some of the exercises with our kids. It really helped. And I have become a better writer myself in the process.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:18.592
I think one of the things that’s really important for us to help you understand right at the get-go is writing is probably the most complex thing we ask of students in the homeschool environment. There are so many things we have to bring to the table when we teach compositional writing. And as parents, we have the expectation that you’re going to write creatively. You’re going to write to an audience. You’re going to write under a time constraint. You’re going to spell it correctly. You’re going to punctuate it correctly. And you’re going to do that joyfully. And the joy gets lost in the process because we as parents forget we are asking too many things of a student at one time.

Gretchen Roe: 00:06:03.951
So the very first thing we would like to encourage you to do is to, as I often say, keep the thing the thing. If you’re working with a student for the creativity of the writing process, don’t worry about the punctuation. Don’t worry about the spelling. Help them stay in the creative end of the enterprise. When I teach at homeschool conferences about this, one of the things I often talk about is you’ll get a student and you’ll say, “I want you to tell me a story about an animal.” And the student says, “I want to write about an elephant.” An elephant. “I’ll write about a pig because I can spell pig, and I’m not sure I can spell elephant.” So they take their creativity and start shrinking it down so they can fit expectations. And we as parents want you to be able to help them maintain that creativity and be able to march forward. Now I have an observation, and it’s a personal one. I had to go have a medical procedure recently. I had to have some injections in my feet. It was not fun, but I have to tell you, the anxiety about the procedure was way larger than the procedure itself. And that’s often what we as parents do, particularly if we’ve had drama, if we’ve had angst, if we’ve had this by play of, “You don’t like me because you judged my paper meanly.” Then we tend to create anxiety in advance of the event. So what we want to set for you in this very beginning of the homeschool year is to sit down with your student regardless of their age and have a conversation about, here’s how you get to change how you think about what you’re going to do. And so Jordi, I wonder if you could, you had said, get very curious about where your reluctant writer’s reluctance comes from. So could you talk a little bit more about that?

Jody Scott: 00:08:10.980
I’m trying to remember exactly the context of which we talked about that. But I would say that oftentimes, they are reluctant because it is so big. Someone says right and it’s like, right. If you break it down, it’s not as big. I think we even have large expectations. When our babies start walking, we don’t sign them up for a marathon. We don’t expect that they are going to run and have such a perfect gate. No, we know that they’re going to walk, walk, fall, walk, walk, fall. And what do we do when they do that? We cheer, right? We cheer. And so your writer is going to write and it’s going to look a little clumsy when they write. It’s going to sound a little clumsy. But we are going to cheer because that is how they get better. We cheer them on. That’s great. Oh, what a great idea. Can we think of another word for run? And they say something, yes, I love that. That’s great. And I think we help them along the process with our kids. We give them our fingers, don’t we? We give them our hands to help them walk. What do we do with our writers? We give them paper and a pencil and walk away. That doesn’t even make sense. We can sit there holding their fingers. Let them grab our hands. Be their scribe . Help pull that story out of them. Really? Oh, how did she eat? How did she eat that pie? Really? She gobbled it up. Oh. And just write that down. Should I write that down? Oh, okay. Good. That’s great. Ask more questions about, okay, maybe it was the elephant. Ask how big was the elephant. Really? Oh. And should we write that down? What’s another word for big? And just kind of help pull that out of them because it’s in there. And cheer them on. Keep cheering them on and cheering them on. And they will get to the point where they can do that 50 yard dash just like those babies.

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:46.601
[crosstalk]

Jody Scott: 00:10:47.053
walking.

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:47.939
One of the things as parents that we fail to take into account, particularly in this digital age, is the necessity of a good writer is a good reader. And so many parents say to me, “Oh, my son, my daughter doesn’t like to read.” Where do you think they find the words like gobble or gargantuan instead of big or placoderm for elephant? They find those words through their reading. So one of the things that we need to be able to do as parents is to help them figure that out. And if you have a student who’s reluctant to pick up a book and read, then you read to them. Or Audible is– I recognize that Audible costs money. There’s another service like Audible which is much less expensive. It’s called Chirp. I happen to live in North Carolina and the North Carolina library system has a huge number of books on audio that I can listen to, that my kids can listen to, alot of classics, a lot of things that are tremendously one of the things I think that’s really important for us as parents to recognize is if we want our children to write well, they have to be exposed to good content. And I have nothing against Dav Pilkey. I love the Captain Underpants books. I’m really an eighth-grade boy inside. So I think his humor is hilarious. But your kids aren’t going to develop a giant vocabulary from Captain Underpants. So we’ve got to be able to expand. But if that’s the way that your child is going to read, your boy, if the only thing he’s going to read is that, then by all means, have him read those books and then branch out from there. You can start with all sorts of things. One parent said to me this summer, “I’m trying. I’m struggling. My son does not have a sense of humor. He doesn’t understand what is funny.” And I said to her, “Well, what is funny to him may not be what’s funny to you.” So maybe there’s merit in going to the National Council of librarian’s book list – and they actually sort books there by genre – to find humorous books. My granddaughter just started first grade, and she said to me, “Granny, I don’t want to go to first grade. I want to be in kindergarten another year.” So I sent her Junie B. Jones first-grader books because I think they’re hilarious. And all six of my kids thought they were funny as well. Out of that, because she’s enjoying those books, she’s exposed to literature that helps her learn to develop the verbal skills necessary to become a compositional writer. So Jody, can you talk a little bit about the kinds of things you see when you evaluate families? You said, you see two kinds of families. And one of those families is, “Oh, man, I wish I was a student in your household.” And you said, some of that is seen with the way parents engage their kids in writing. So can you talk a little bit more about that?

Jody Scott: 00:14:12.964
I’ve seen some families that will go through your regular writing-type assignments, and others that are really writing about their life. They’re writing about their passions. They are engaging their students, really, on a relational level, and then they’re writing from that. And so they’re writing from the students’ own experiences. And I think the students– that’s something everyone can write about. I can write about myself. I can write about what I’m doing because I know what I’m doing. I can write about when the cow and the goat were giving birth. I can write about that. And there’s some really great verbs and adjectives I can come up with. So I think when the students and parents collaborate, and you really listen to your student, you hear what they’re excited about, and you let that be the springboard, I think that’s very helpful in encouraging a reluctant writer and isolating those skills. If you have a younger writer – and I did this with my son, even through sixth grade – be their scribe so that their creativity is not hindered by this very separate skill of the mechanics of writing and spellings.

Gretchen Roe: 00:15:56.204
One of the things that I think is always beneficial is as a parent, you can certainly sit and keyboard and say to your student, “Tell me a story– I’m going to type and you’re just going to tell me your story.” But the most important thing about that is have you brainstormed that story? Have you talked about that story? Because really, in the writing process, the most important thing is not the draft. It’s the brainstorming of what do you want to say? How do you want to say it? So you want to write a story about an elephant. What about this elephant? Is it going to be a fictional story? Is it going to be a factual story? Do we need to do a little research? Do we have creativity in our head from movies we’ve seen, documentaries? What do we have that we can use to fill our quiver so that we can pull those things out as we tell our story and do it creatively? Many of you, when you registered for this webinar, said to us, “We want to know more about the newest acquisition from Demme Learning, which is WriteShop.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:17:05.224
And one of the things I think that is tremendously beneficial about WriteShop is the fact that often we limit a kid’s creativity because we have the expectation that they’re going to write what we want them to write. And that becomes problematic. I remember vividly when my youngest daughter was in eighth grade, she was given the task of writing about a baseball experience. And nobody was interested in sports in my household. None of the eight of us cared a whit about baseball. So that was a very hard composition. So one of the things I think that is tremendously beneficial in a WriteShop experience is we’re not going to ask you to define what you’re going to write about. We’re going to give you the tools for allowing your student to pick what they would like to write about and then help them accomplish that task. And Jody, you had said that when you see families who submit good writing experiences, you talked about a structure and a framework. Can you talk a little bit more in-depth about what that might look like and maybe some of the things that you did with your own students when you taught creative writing?

Jody Scott: 00:18:23.059
Sure. Well, to go back to what you said about brainstorming, that was always first. And we would have our lists. And with younger kids, you could even put it on chart paper. So we said, “Okay, what do they look like?” Maybe, “What does it smell like? What might you hear in this story? What are some sound words?” So we would go through the five senses to get some five-sense words. And we would first just brainstorm, brainstorm verbs, brainstorm adjectives, and so we have lots of wonderful words to choose from. Then as they’re writing, if they would choose one, we would cross it out as they chose it. We would cross it out and they would see how many they could cross out. So we did that. But also, I think something that WriteShop utilizes that I love, that I utilized as well, are checklists because it removes me as mom, as teacher from the equation as the evaluator of their writing. You have a checklist telling them, “Okay, we want to see this type of verb or this type of adjective or this type of opener,” or whatever it might be. It’s not mom saying, “This isn’t good enough.” And that hurts. It’s one thing to get a 9 out of a 10 or 7 out of 10 on a math sheet. It’s either right or it’s wrong. It’s another thing when mom says, well, you could change this, that, or the other about your writing. I know that you are just trying to help your student, that you’re trying to help them become a better writer. We want to get them from point A to point B to point C, and so we have to show them ways to improve. But to them, it sounds critical. It’s very personal. And they can take it very personally. And that was not good for my relationship with my kids. They felt like they were never good enough for me. They felt that I was criticizing their work. And it was like a piece of artwork or something. And I was saying, “Well, you could do–” it’s like, “How about you add some blue and some red?” And they took it very personally. So the checklists were just such a blessing to my mom’s heart because I felt like I could back up, be the mom, be the encourager. I love it, I love it, I love it. Let’s see what the checklist says. And it was on the checklist. The checklist said it fell short. And so let’s go back and let’s tweak this a bit. But it removed me from that very uncomfortable, sometimes hurtful– not meaning to be, but hurtful position.

Gretchen Roe: 00:21:25.554
Right. Exactly. And I think Jody has given you some good observations here. We have lots of questions today, so I want to make sure that we turn our attention to those questions. But one of the things that Jody said a minute ago is be the scribe for your student. If the mechanics of handwriting are getting your student caught up in the process and they’re struggling with those mechanics, then it’s up to us as the parent to figure out a workaround. Here’s a wonderful scribe for you, your phone. Open an email, hit the talk button and say, “Tell me a story.” And what you’re doing there is you’re capturing thoughts in a draft form so that you can then help your student learn to organize them. Anything as a parent that we can do that takes away the anxiety of production makes it a better experience. And I want to share my screen here just for a quick moment because I think there’s a tremendous amount of expectation that we put on students. And this screen that you’re looking at here is two hands. The hand on the left is a six-year-old child. The hand on the right is a 13-year-old child. So when we ask a student who might be six, seven, eight years old to write a composition, they’re often doing it with hands that don’t even have all the bones formed in their hands. And that can become very problematic for students. So I’d like to encourage you to recognize you can’t expect adult output from a six, seven, eight-year-old student. So anything that we can do to facilitate that output makes it much more doable.

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:12.564
And one of the things that I have fallen in love with about WriteShop is you’re several elements into any writing experience before that student is actually putting a pencil on a paper. And that makes all the difference in the world for your student. Now, I have entertained several comments from the WriteShop community in the last couple of days of parents who are getting started with the program and they’re asking all sorts of questions. And so I just want to make sure that we set expectations appropriately. I pulled Book F off my shelf, and I thought, “All right. What am I really asking of a parent? Am I asking of a parent this many pages? It seems like a lot. It’s like 32 pages of reading. But here’s what I’m going to recommend to you. In any level of WriteShop, they’re giving you all sorts of suggestions for accomplishing your materials. Does it mean you have to implement everything? No. The good news is you’re in charge. The bad news is you’re in charge. So I recommended that you pick up one of these, which is a highlighter, and you spend a little bit of time and do your own homework and go through those pages and highlight what appeals to you. Ask yourself the question, in the process of doing these materials, what would make this more enjoyable for me, and highlight that so that when you begin the elements contained in the WriteShop experience, you’re ready to roll. So many of you ask questions about WriteShop, and I’ve got good news for you. We did a webinar in the spring that goes into a great deal of depth about the writing program. So we’re not going to do that today. We’re going to give you in our follow-up notes a link to that webinar so you can hone in on questions specific to your student and what you would like to see them be able to accomplish. Toward that end, I have lots of questions from you all. So I’m going to start tossing questions at Jodie. And I know she’s really good at answering them. And then we’ll see where we go from here. So let me get into these questions, and let’s see where we go from here. Jody, the first question was, how do I teach my 13-year-old basic composition skills? He’s unable to form a paragraph independently. So, how can we talk a little bit about ways to help that particular student? Because 14-year-old boys seem to be the ones who hate writing with an absolute passion.

Jody Scott: 00:26:02.654
Well, I think, obviously, you start simple. Even though he’s 13, remember that your goal is progress, not perfection. And you need to start where he’s at. And where he’s at is a paragraph, not an essay, not a full report, but a paragraph. So learning what makes a good paragraph. You even may have to back it up and say, “What are the parts of a sentence? What must a sentence have?” And then, once again, bring in his interests. Write on something he loves. You want to write on something he loves because you want to make it as easy as possible. And you want to set him up to succeed because success breeds more success.

Jody Scott: 00:27:02.508
If they have a successful experience, okay. He wrote a great five-sentence paragraph. Start small. Start small. And you can write one topic sentence, three details about that baseball or that course or whatever it might be. And then a concluding sentence. Okay, simple, praise him, praise him, praise him. Go back. Take that same paragraph, and say, “Now we’re going to take that same paragraph and just make it better, make it longer, add some more interest to it.” Take baby steps. So we’re not going to write a whole new paragraph. We’re just going to make that one better. Then we’re going to take that one and make that paragraph longer. And just take very small incremental steps. Don’t just jump into the five-paragraph essay when they can’t write one paragraph. Your goal is progress, progress, progress. And don’t get frustrated because in the first month, you aren’t on to that five-paragraph essay. By the end of the year, you will be. You can’t grow discouraged because of small steps. We all begin with small steps.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:39.660
And one of the things that I said to you all is we weren’t going to do a great deal of explanation about the WriteShop program because the other webinar that we’re going to refer you to will take you through that process. But I think one of the things that’s important– if you’re a parent weighing whether WriteShop might be a better experience than something you’ve done in the past, I want you to think– probably the paramount question to be able to ask yourself is “What is my student’s level of thinking?” So your placement here in this program is going to be, “How does your student think?” Not what have they produced, but what are their thinking skills? And often, particularly boys, have a much more sophisticated level of thinking than what they can produce. And we want to capture them where they’re engaged in the process and that makes a tremendous amount of difference. So I want you to be able to think, particularly with that student– when you go through the placement process, I think it’s pretty straightforward. But let me also say that if you finish the placement process and you have questions, we’d recommend you reach out to us through the phone, through live chat, through an email and say, “Here are my questions. Can you help me make sure that I get it right?” Because our goal is to make sure that you always get it right the first time.

Gretchen Roe: 00:30:02.511
The next question I have, Jodie, is a simple, straightforward, open-and-go, comprehensive way to teach composition. That was the question that two parents asked. I don’t think that truly, honestly, exists where there’s nothing that you as a parent have to do upfront. So Jodie, give me a little bit of insight into how did you prepare to teach. What are the things that you thought about before you sat down with your student? And I have said with WriteShop, you’ve got in this level, about 30 pages that I recommend– if you want this to be an open-and-go experience, you go in and you do that reading and you do that highlighting so that you know how you want to approach those materials. And then, yes, you will have that open-and go-experience. But Jodie, what are the kinds of questions you need to ask yourself as the parent before you engage in the process?

Jody Scott: 00:30:58.113
Sure. I definitely think that there is no open-and-go in composition, unless you are dropping them off at a co-op, maybe. But even with that, I would say you’re with them four out of the five days. So you really can’t– you really have to be involved in the process. There are no shortcuts here. But I would say the way I prepared was– I did what Gretchen’s talking about. I read the beginning that’s to the parent. I probably read it several times. I went on. I watched any videos or anything that was available. And I actually did the first three lessons myself as a student. That is what I did to prepare to teach a lot of students. I wanted to know what are they going to feel as they’re doing this. So that’s why I did it myself. And I think it gave me a measure of compassion and understanding because even with my knowledge, even with my experience, I had to sit and kind of think. And I wanted to kind of feel what they’re going to feel to some measure anyway. But definitely read highlight. I tend to flag things. If there’s something I really like, I get one of those flags, those post-it flags. And I flagged it because I wanted something to stick out that I can quickly go to. So definitely highlight, flag, and possibly do the first assignment, or even do it with them. I know for one of my kids, I sat there and I said, “Okay, I’m setting the timer. We’re both going to sit here.” I had a notebook. He had a notebook. We’re both going to sit here and we’re going to brainstorm. Then we’re going to brainstorm together. And we both did the assignment. It was amazing how much better he focused when he knew that’s what I was doing too.

Gretchen Roe: 00:33:26.289
In that scenario, you’re not the instructor, you’re the collaborator next to them. That’s a great idea. Jodie said something that was really important, talking about a 13-year-old who’s going to start with five sentences and eventually work their way into that five-paragraph essay. As a parent, I want you to keep every composition your student writes. And the reason I want you to do that is because, like Jody said, we’re looking for progress, not perfection. So when you have a student in March who is going, “Ah, this is just not working. I don’t know why I’m struggling so much.” You can pull out those September essays and say, “Yeah, but look at the progress you’ve made over time.” You don’t want to keep the physical papers? Create a folder and take a picture and put it in your phone or on your desktop so that your student can have that year-over-year comparison for that progress because I think it makes all the difference in the world. I want to make another observation for you all. If you are a very confident writer as a parent, it’s harder for you to teach your student because when we get really good at something, we forget the struggle that was necessary for us to get there. And so we don’t have a long on-ramp for our kids to learn the process. So we would really like to encourage you to give them the grace to have a long on-ramp in that writing process. And one of the things that you will find as you use the right shop materials is they will create that on-ramp for you. So if you use them as they’re designed, they’ll really help you do that. Jody, I have a parent who says, “Becoming competent in teaching write shop to my high schooler.” And what would be some of the things that you would say– when we’re working with a high school student, I think we’re looking at a different animal, if you will, than working with a middle school student. So what are some of the dialogue questions that you would have with parent and student together before they even began that writing process? I know we talked a little bit about this when we planned. And you had some great observations talking about getting in touch with how they felt in the process.

Jody Scott: 00:36:00.754
Well, right, one and two both written a little differently in that you know they are written more to the student and the student can take the reins more and it can be more of an independent process for them depending on where that student is at. And I think once again, they have the checklist. So the rubrics are there. You are not the evaluator of their work. We’re actually training them to self-evaluate their work. That’s extremely important because when they get to college, they’re not going to hand it to someone– well, they can. They usually have a study center. They can hand it to someone to look at. But they also have to develop the ability to self-edit, to self-correct, to self-improve. And that helps them through that process. I would say at that point, if you are still working with your student beyond just being a set of eyes to take a look at it when they’re done, that you would want to be as hands-off as possible, try not to take over. It is so tempting. We have a lot of great ideas as moms. And we’re, “Oh, I know what you could do. You could do this. Oh, what about this?” I’m so guilty. I’m so guilty. And my kids have had to say to me, “Mom, this is my paper.” Okay, I’m thinking, “But I could really help make it better.” I know I could. But that’s the point is it’s not mine and it’s theirs and we want them to own their paper. And I should be able to write a better paper than my student, but I should not take over the writing of their paper. So don’t take over. Be more hands-off. Let them drive the process and really lean into those rubrics and point them back to that because we really want to encourage independence.

Jody Scott: 00:38:19.327
All that being said, I did actually help– one of my six needed help all the way through high school. I was even his scribe all the way to senior year. And I think there was only one paper he wrote from beginning to end without me. And when he went off to college, I said, “Get help early and often go right to that study center.” I think I was so nervous. I said, “Get to the study center. Get to the study center. We’re paying for this. They will help you.” Because I knew he needed more support. I had already identified him as one of my kids that needed more academic support. And to his credit, he went there the very first day of classes. And they said, “Do you need help?” He said, “No, I’m here because my mom said to come here and I’m going to do my homework here in case I need you.” But he did well. He thrived and he grew. I thought I was going to be homeschooling college or something, but he thrived and he grew. And he did it. He did it. And he remembered things that we had done over and over and over and over again. I wanted to say that because I know that there are students out there that are flying on their own. They’re high flyers and they are soaring. And you can hand them those WriteShop one and two books and off they go. But there is a population on the other end that will still need support. And that is okay. We are here to support them. We try to back it off as much as possible to help them fly solo. But yeah, definitely let your child take the reins and don’t take control of their writing. It’s theirs. Let them own it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:40:31.770
I think Jody said two very valuable things here. The first is let your child take the reins when you can, but you may have a child who’s reluctant to do that, and that’s still okay. I often talk about my eldest son who was absolutely brilliant. He taught himself to read before he began kindergarten. But he couldn’t be left alone for a writing exercise or a single mathematical problem until he was almost 17 years old. Did that mean that he was too distractable? No, not really, because this is a kid who literally read an encyclopedia back when those things were still on our shelves end to end. So his distractibility was related to output, not input. And a lot of you have those kids. And I want to encourage you all that it takes as long as it takes. So we have parents who will call in and say, “Well, when can I expect my student to do their writing composition experiences on their own?” And sometimes you all aren’t happy with us when we say, “It depends. It depends on how well their ability to take the reins translates into their own life. And here’s an opportunity for you as a parent to be the editor and the collaborator alongside your student and help them learn to take the reins.” We live in an ever more literate society. And I had the privilege of spending part of the weekend with my middle daughter. She’s in her 30s. She’s a research biologist. And she is struggling right now with a 40-page paper. And I’m going to end up editing that paper. I don’t even know all of the technological terms in the paper. What she’s got me looking for are things like comma splices and punctuation errors. And making sure that her thoughts from the beginning of a paragraph to the end of the paragraph are fluid. Those are things as parents that we can do for our students. Recognize that the punctuation and that element is what comes at the very end of the experience. So if you’re arguing with your student about punctuation and they haven’t produced a final draft for you, we’ve kind of got the cart before the horse. And some of us are the gods and goddesses of the red pen. And we tend to get really caught up in saying, “Well, you did this wrong, you did this wrong.” Or “This would be better if you did this.” Remember, it’s your student’s compositional assignment.

Gretchen Roe: 00:43:15.669
The second thing that Jody said that I think is really, really important here is we need to equip our kids to know where their weaknesses lie so that they can begin to improve those weaknesses. And if they understand that, then the writing experience becomes far easier. I talk about my youngest daughter who, when she was in middle school, was the Lucy from the Peanuts compositionalist. If you said, “Give me 75 words,” she was over there counting every word. “And okay, I got 56 words. Let me see what’s the next sentence that I might get 7 more words in.” In order to help her become creative, I had to learn how to ask her the right questions. And one of the things that I think write shop will help you do is in those checklists that Jodie mentioned earlier, they will begin to help you as a parent learn to ask the right questions to help your child become more creative. That child went on to high school and participated in NaNoWriMo, which is the national novel writing competition. You have to produce 50,000 words in 30 days. And she did it three years running. So I know that she finally uncorked her own creativity, and she still writes for her own pleasure to this day. But that wasn’t something that was achieved overnight. So Jody said a very valuable thing. Don’t be exasperated if this takes time. It’s important for us as parents to recognize we’re playing the long game, particularly with composition. Jody, I have a parent who said that they were beginning Write Shop this year and were looking for some helpful hints. So since you are a customer service rep and you talk to parents all the time when they call in, what are some things that you might suggest as far as a helpful hint is concerned? And you’ve said two of them, which is be encouraging and be collaborative. What else do you have for our parents?

Jody Scott: 00:45:25.306
Well, I would say sometimes it does depend on the level, but I would say you definitely be prepared. Go through that book, be prepared, and don’t plan on doing everything. Pick and choose. Like Gretchen said, “This is a buffet and you don’t necessarily have to do every single activity.” But I would also just encourage you to use the technology we do have available to us. That son who struggled really in order to think had to move. So for him, even today, he dictates. He dictates things and he talks and he walks and that is how he writes. He’s actually an engineer by trade now and doing well. But even when he writes emails, he’ll dictate it. Why not? We have the technology. I do evaluations for a student who all through high school, she great, wonderful papers. And she always dictated them. And then she would go back or she dictated actually with her computer and she would go back and then edit. Another tip, if you have older kids, use Grammarly. Grammarly is such a great tool. I have Grammarly. I encourage all my kids to have Grammarly. And that is one way I actually took myself out of the editing process. I would have my kids, I would say, “Okay. Look at all those red lines. There’s a reason they’re red. You kind of need to click and find out why was it red? Maybe it was the wrong tense of the word. Maybe they’re missing a comma. Maybe they’re just missing a space or something like that. Maybe it was had to do with their typing. A capital letter, maybe if it was a squiggly, maybe it was a misspelled word. But use the tools we have.” We live in a day and age where there are apps and there are tools that can help us. My kids never learned how to format APA and MLA. They learned the tools that are on the internet where they can plug in the book and it will format it for them. That way, if there are ever any changes, they don’t have to worry about finding it in a book, relearning it. I said, “It’s important to be resourceful, to know what tools are out there that can help you that wasn’t doing the writing for them. It was just helping them. And Grammarly doesn’t do the writing for you. It just helps you to fine-tune your writing and it really draws your attention to the mistakes you’re making consistently. So I would say use those tools. Use the tools for the upper level and really be prepared, and going into teaching your grammar by reading the teacher portion, by watching some videos online. We have a support area with some videos, a blog, some great articles and videos. Definitely, go in prepared, and don’t start with too much. Set yourself up to succeed. Try this one activity. Okay. Then the next day, you do something else. Don’t over-plan. You can always add more the next week, but definitely, set yourself up to succeed.

Gretchen Roe: 00:49:22.470
I think we would be remiss if, in the closing 10 minutes of this conversation, we didn’t talk about parents who are reluctant to go through the writing process with their children because their children have dyslexia. I have two dyslexic children myself, and I think it’s important for you to understand dyslexia means you have to be more creative as the parent to help your children be able to write well. It doesn’t mean they are incapable of writing and I want to make sure that we set aside that myth that says that dyslexics can’t write. As a matter of fact, in our research for this particular enterprise, we found Agatha Christie, Stephen King, and even Dave Pilkey, who I mentioned earlier, are all dyslexics, but successful writers. There’s a huge difference between how you think and what you produce, and if we can teach kids how to translate what they think into a production copy that is helpful, clear, concise, well-written, it makes all the difference in the world. One of the stories that I’ve enjoyed telling this past year is my son has a friend from high school who now has a job at the local Chick-fil-A, and she had to write an essay to become a team member on how she would contribute to being a team member for Chick-fil-A. High schooler, not a school experience, but she wanted a job, and of course, her essay was successful. So our goal as homeschool parents is to set our kids up for success, and in that process, I think it’s really important that we make sure that we don’t look at things that we perceive as barriers and write our children off and not allow them to participate. My middle son, who was a profound dyslexic, didn’t learn to read until he was almost nine-and-a-half. When he went to college, he came home one semester and said, “I’m going to take British literature for my elective [laughter].” And I have to tell you, this was not my best mom moment. I said, “Are you nuts? I minored in English in college and I wouldn’t take Brit lit as [laughter] an elective.” And he said, “Well, I think I can, so I’m going to try.” And he had a teacher who corrected for grammar and punctuation and spelling, and I want you to know that that kid applied himself and came out of that class at the end of the semester with a nice, solid B, and I couldn’t have been more proud of him. And as the parent, I I had to learn to step aside because he had the confidence to do it. So who was I to say he wasn’t capable of doing it? Jody, we’ve got about eight minutes left. What are your closing thoughts for parents here as we conclude this important topic today?

Jody Scott: 00:52:24.671
Be kind to your student, encourage them, and be kind to yourself. Don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re at this place where maybe it’s difficult for you, but you can do this. I believe you can do this. And it doesn’t matter what yesterday was like. Today is a new day. Tomorrow is a new day. And you can do this. Be kind to yourself.

Gretchen Roe: 00:52:57.736
I think that’s a really good observation because so many of you said something about maybe dislike, dread, don’t want to, all of those ways that we couch things. And we get what we say. I think that’s the easiest way to say that is if we say this is going to be really hard, yeah, it usually is. But if we set ourselves up with the intent to have a better year this year, then we can have a more successful year. And I think that’s what we all want as parents. So if you’ve had writing struggles in the past, before you begin any compositional experience, whether it’s write shop or another compositional program, I would encourage you to sit down with your students, and you might be amazed at the insight they can offer you. Ask them, “What did you like about what we used? What did you not like? What do you think went well? What do you think we could improve?” All of those questions will be essential in your building a successful collaboration in the writing experience this year.

Gretchen Roe: 00:54:12.205
As I said in the beginning of the presentation, we have a webinar that we will post in the show notes for you all to see. If you’re looking for the semantics of, “How does write shop work? How can it help me have a better experience with my student?” Then that will definitely be something that will be on your homework agenda for you to review. Because I think my collaborator, Kim Wample, who is our English language arts specialist, does such a marvelous job of explaining the elements of the program and why you would find virtue in using it. I want to thank you all for joining us today. Jody, what are your final closing thoughts for parents in a general parameter of their beginning their homeschool year? So what do you want to say to encourage them?

Jody Scott: 00:55:04.793
Take one day at a time. It can be overwhelming to focus. You do want to take a look at the end because you want to start with the end in mind and you want to plan with that end in mind. But today is today. Just focus on today. Thinking about all those months ahead and all the lessons may be overwhelming. Take one day at a time. One day at a time, give yourself grace, give your students grace, and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. And I think as we do that, do the next lesson, then do the next activity, one foot in front of the other, and you’ll be amazed at how far you are by the end of the year.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:02.412
And actually, I want to give a shout-out to Jody because a couple, two or three weeks ago, we were having a conversation that was not live for prime time like this conversation is. But she was talking about the difference between, “Are you an internal processor or an external processor?” And as a parent teaching writing, holy mackerel, does this make an incredible amount of difference. If you’re an internal processor, all the conversations about what you’re doing well or what you’re not doing well happen between your ears, and you don’t speak it out loud. And if you have a student who’s trying to learn that process, I want to encourage you to be that external processor, even if that’s not your natural vent. If you can look at your own writing, those collaborative experiences that Jodie talked about and say, “Oh, I wish I’d said this this way.” Or, “When I wrote this, I was thinking–” There’s all sorts of things that open doors for your student. And if they have the opportunity to collaborate with you and come along beside you, and you help them process their thoughts, it becomes a much easier experience to make it a successful enterprise. Jodie, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. It’s always great fun to collaborate with you. Jodie mentioned our blog, and I want her to give a plug for our customer service staff before we conclude, because Jody’s part of that staff. And man, these ladies are the bomb. But I’ll let Jodie tell you a little bit more about that.

Jody Scott: 00:57:42.250
We have an amazing team of moms all ready to talk with you, to encourage you. And we love it when you call. We really do. And we want to, we want to help you succeed. And just like sometimes your kids need you to grab a hold of their hand, you might need someone to grab your hand. And we’re here. We’re here to grab your hand, to give you encouragement, to help bring clarity, maybe whenever there’s confusion. Or we have another team that will help assist in placement. If you do those placement, quizzes and you’re still a little confused as to where they might be, we have placement specialists that really want to help you get that placement right, as Gretchen said the first time. And so please don’t hesitate to call. We are here. We’re waiting for your call. We love it when you call. And we look forward to connecting with you.

Gretchen Roe: 00:58:48.956
Yeah, I want to give a shout-out to our placement staff. We call them our Customer Success Team. And they are three of the most professional folks. We have one dad and two moms, and all of them have worked either as homeschoolers themselves or collaborated with homeschoolers for upwards of 20 years. And they are here to help you feel confident in the choices that you make. So whether we’re talking about a right shop placement or any one of the Demme Learning products that you see behind me, they’re here to help you be successful in your journey. Please don’t hesitate. There’s no cost. There’s no obligation. Our placement team is here to see that you get it right. This is Gretchen Roee for The Demme Learning Show. Thanks for joining us. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or go on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it.

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