What to Consider in Choosing a Homeschooling Curriculum

I’ve gotten a reader request to write up my thoughts on choosing a curriculum, so I’m jumping ahead to the end of the series, and then I’ll come back and revisit Math and Religion.

Can you afford it?  With a very few exceptions, I don’t ever recommend pursuing education you can’t afford.  End of story.  Kolbe and the like are not cheap (though Kolbe is less expensive than some of the other alternatives), and as with many good or convenient things, when you are short on cash, you have to find another way.  Sometimes the other way is in fact a better way, so don’t panic.

–> Don’t spend your whole book budget at the beginning of the year. Save some money for mid-year changes, because you aren’t omniscient, so there’s a decent chance you’ll pick one or two flops.  It’s okay.  Set aside the cash so you have it when you need it.

Does is fit with your real life?  That’s how we ended up with Kolbe, FYI.  I’m perfectly capable of writing and teaching from my own curriculum, and enjoyed doing it. But I’m not at all above outsourcing cleaning help, buying prepared foods, paying some other mom to drive the carpool to dance class . . . whatever it takes to make real life work. [I once started to ask my daughter to pray my rosary for me, then remembered, “No, that’s not something you’re supposed to delegate.”]  When I was at a point where something (else) had to give, on the long list of things I do, writing up weekly course plans was one I learned I could outsource.  So we did.  It’s been good.

–> My point here is to encourage parents to look closely at the time and energy and involvement different curricula require.  Don’t pick Math Made Easy By 60 Minutes of Absolute Silence if you just gave birth to quadruplets. It’s okay to pick the cheesy, low-intensity, lowest-common-denominator program, if that’s the one you’ll actually do.  Doing all (or most) of the work from a cushy program is better than doing little or none of the work from that majestic High Standards Because We Are Achievers program.

Do you like it?  You.  The parent.  When you read about the curriculum, or thumb through the book, does it make you smile?  If it makes you groan, or you think, “I guess I have to do this because these smart people say you have to, but how on earth . . .” that’s your warning.  Back away.  If you hate it, it’s not going to work.

Do you believe it matters?  If the student finds it fun, the student will do it.  Unfortunately, there’s a 95% chance you are going to try to teach your child something the child doesn’t think is fun.  Which means your willpower is the only thing that will make the learning happen.  Don’t spend a lot of money and space and guilt on a product you don’t actually think matters.

–> I am increasingly convinced that the reason Living Books or Nature Study or Memorization Of Everything or Latin First English Second or Name That Approach, Written About With Fervor And You’re Ruining Your Child If You Neglect This One Thing . . . I’m convinced they work, and work well, because of the teacher’s enthusiasm.  There are bad teaching methods, don’t mistake me.  And I have methods I love and firmly believe in, and that I think make for sound teaching and real education.  But ultimately some part of my success as a teacher isn’t about having found The One True Way, it’s about having found a way that I can run with, that matches who I am and how I teach and the way my brain works and helps me connect to my students.*

As you learn about curricula, look for choices that just seem so right.  They just seem to fit.  They make you smile and go, “Yes!”.  That’s your ideal.

Do you scruple?  Kolbe is very intent on subsidiarity, and I love that.  As the parent-teacher, I blackline some assignments, I add to others, some things I trade out wholesale.  I have a friend who nearly died of heart failure using Seton, not because Seton is a money-maker for cardiologists, but because she wasn’t comfortable with paring down the curriculum as she needed to do (and as her advisers at Seton said she should).  She does everything 100%.   Seton proposes a tremendous curriculum, and she didn’t know how to say No to the parts that were too much.  She needed a lighter program that she could plow through from start to finish, and rest knowing she had Done The Whole Thing.

***

Those are my main thoughts.  I know we have a number of other homeschoolers reading here. What else would you add?

 

 

*This, I believe, is why Math books are like a religion unto themselves.

 

 

 

3.5 Time Outs: Awestruck

Thanks once again to our host, Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy.

Click and be amazed.

1.

This week I learned that someone was in awe of me. I advised her to seek counseling.

Not actually.  I did tell her she has a vivid imagination. That explanation makes it a reasonable mistake – imagine you knew me only on the internet, and furthermore had seen pictures of my home when it wasn’t that terribly terribly out of control — it could happen.  You’d be deluded.  But an honest mistake.

2.

I saw the most amazing floors this weekend.  Clean.  You’re chuckling now, thinking you’ve seen such a thing before.  No.  Quite possibly you have not. I hadn’t. These were VERY VERY clean floors.  They shined.  They were smooth underfoot.  No tiny grains of sand (of course we removed our shoes at the door).  No coarse edges.  No lint.  No crayons.  Clean.  And my daughter who babysits for this family reports these floors are always this clean.  Always.

Now to my knowledge, this family has no cleaning help.  They do have a new baby, a preschool boy of the usual energy level of preschool boys, and a homeschooled rising kindergartner.  Yes, this family does crafts.  Yes, this family eats dinner.  Yes, the children are home all day. And no, the mom is not a powerhouse of non-stop energy.  She is just a very, very, clean person.

This is what she loves.  I think she spends as many minutes cleaning as I spend writing, and as many minutes decluttering as I spend reading, and those two facts explain her home, my home, and our respective literary outputs.

Other than that, we’re both normal people.

3.

Now if you have spent an evening in one of these homes, it is truly a marvel.  It was relaxed and comfortable — the furniture was simple and unpretentious, the food was home-cooking, the children chased each other in loops through the kitchen, changed into 70 different dress-up outfits (actually just three, rotated), and there was the rhythmic thud of a boy jumping off his toddler slide onto a pile of cushions into what would have been the dining room, if these were the sort of people who were interested in impressing rather than welcoming.

Instead it was just luxurious.  So clean.  So peaceful (to someone used to preschoolers). Plus: Jello-Whip Cream Salad, green.  And I did marvel.  Wow.  God made a person who loves cleaning this much.  It is truly a work of art.  A gift to the world, however small and humble.

But because I’ve known Mrs. E all these years, I wasn’t intimidated.  She’s a normal person who happens to have this one gift.

So that was great, and now I remind myself when I’m intimidated by someone, that it’s because I’m only seeing some small side, and not the whole picture. And when I’m unimpressed by someone — same story.  You know there’s another side that tells much more.  Just have to dig for it.

3.5

Chickens.  Just two.  Strictly as pets.

Pets you can eat.

***

Well that’s all for today.  Tuesday is Link Day for all topics, help yourself if you are so inclined.   Post as many as you want, but only one per comment or the spam dragon will eat you up and I’ll never even know.  Have a great week!

At CatholicMom.com: Homeschool Planning & Setting Priorities

Homeschool Planning: You Can’t Do Everything in which I talk about the trade-offs my family makes in order to bring our curricular fantasies down to earth, and put together a homeschool curriculum we can actually sort of accomplish, more or less.  Also in which we discover I’m much better about wanting to study Latin than about actually studying it.

The Kolbe Reviews: Geography

For Geography, Kolbe uses the Map Skills series from Continental Press.  It’s rare that a teacher with a passion for a topic is wholeheartedly enthused about a particular textbook, but I am in love.  Love.  LOVE.

This is the best thing going.  It’s an 8×11 glossy full-color paperback.  The fourth grade book has about 42 lessons, the sixth grade book has sixty. So throughout the course of the year, students do one or two lessons per week, depending on how you divide it out.  Each page is its own self-contained lesson.  The student reads the explanation and then answers the questions using the map on the page.

What I love:

Self-contained and self-teaching.  Once or twice there has been an assignment that required using a separate map (ie, “a map of your state”), and we’ve pulled out the globe as well.  My sixth grader considers this to be the fun page — like doing one of those puzzle games on the children’s menu at the family restaurant.  My fourth grader can read the lesson and do the work by herself 90% of the time.

Real maps from around the world.  There’s never an assignment using a fictional map to illustrate a point.  The Kolbe course plans periodically call for map-memorization (state capitals, etc.), but just doing the work in the book is an education in world geography all on its own.

Spiral curriculum.  You can start the series on grade-level, even if your student has never done geography before.  The fourth and sixth grade books cover all the same essential concepts — the difference is that the sixth grade lessons delve into each topic with a little more detail and little more difficulty. I believe Kolbe stops using the books after 6th grade, though there is a final book for grades 7 or 8.  If your older student has never studied geography and needs to be brought up to speed, just pick up the last book and it’s all there.

To study geography, or not?

Kolbe advises parents to skip geography if the overall course load is too overwhelming.  I partially disagree:

• I think it’s fine to do geography some years but not all, or to spread one book over two years.
• But geography matters, and is a skill of its own separate from the subjects it supports.  History and earth science make no sense if you don’t also know geography.  And trip planning?  Let’s just say it’s no fun traveling with people who can’t or won’t read maps.
• In my experience, struggling students are sometimes helped by easing off the overwhelming subject, and exercising the brain elsewhere.  The geography in this series requires math, reading comprehension, writing, and visual processing skills.

So in our family, my inclination is to reduce the number of assignments from the National Catholic Reader (but still do some of the better selections) and hold onto geography, at least most years.

The Kolbe Course Plans

The course plans call for students to do two assignments per week.  There are no quarterly exams.  Other than a few “memorize this” or “practice that” assignments, the plans simply divide the book so students know how many pages to do each week.  So if you are not enrolling with Kolbe, I’d skip these plans and write your own chart of how many pages to do.  Or just open the book and circle pages.

Write in the book, or not?

This is not a reproducible, so photocopying assignments violates the copyright.  There are some assignments that require students to label the map in the book. We chose to have the kids write their answers on separate paper (works 85% of the time), if there was a map to label, we’d just do that assignment orally, and the student could point to the answer on the page.  The glossy pages are fairly durable, so the book should hand down as well as any other text.  Given the option of buying the book themselves or writing on a separate sheet of paper, both kids decided to save their cash for better purposes.

What else do you want to know?  I’ve got the fourth and sixth grade books on hand, and the course plans, so ask away.

 

 

Book Review: Eric Sammons’ Holiness for Everyone

Eric Sammons sent me a pdf review copy of his new book, Holiness for Everyone: The Practical Spirituality of St. Josemaria Escriva, not because we’ve ever met or even know each other on the internet, but, I gather, because I really liked his first book, Who is Jesus Christ?  (Which I wholeheartedly recommend.) He’s smart that way.  I like this one too.

What is isn’t:  We have to start here, because it’s easy to guess wrong.

1. Eric Sammons is not a member of Opus Dei, and this is not a how-to book on being a member of that organization, nor an account of that group’s history.  Opus Dei barely gets mention, other than to recommend two reliable books on the topic.
2. This is not a colorful anecdote-laden biography of St. Josemaria.  The chapter that tells his life focuses is on his spiritual development — the details that help you understand the saint’s approach to holiness for ordinary people.

What it is:

St. Josemaria Escriva is a 20th century saint whose spirituality is very much in line with St. Therese of Lisieux, whose Story of a Soul was a bestseller during his formative years, and  Blessed Theresa of Calcutta, who was his contemporary and likewise informed by the spirituality of St. Therese.  Basic Catholic practical holiness — what you see in the lives of every saint across all of history.

St. Josemaria’s particular charism was the insistence that saintliness is not for the vowed religious only — an error of his time, and still a struggle among Catholics today.  We tend today to either fall into the get-thee-to-a-nunnery trap, or just dismiss saintliness as something that hardly matters anyhow.  St. Josemaria’s contention, and Eric Sammons’ as well, is that it is possible for you and I to actually be holy.  And that there are specific steps we can take to cooperate with God’s grace in working towards that goal.

As with Who is Jesus Christ, Sammons’ text is packed with information and insight, but still approachable for the average reader.   It covers similar territory as Christian Self-Mastery, but far more readable than that classic.  I personally found every chapter to be helpful for me — life-changing, even.

Who would enjoy it?  I’d recommend this for older teens and adults who want to be challenged with practical ways to grow in the Christian life.  This is not mere inspiration: expect to be pushed to make specific resolutions about your prayer life and penitential practices.  There are discussion questions at the end of every chapter, making this a great book club choice.

This would make an excellent post-confirmation course for 11th and 12th graders — either taught in a high school religion class, or as a parent-teen book study.  (Also think: Post-RCIA discipleship group.) Because the text ties to free, online additional reading (Escriva, assorted Encyclicals), it would be easy to make a rounded-out senior-high religion curriculum using this book.

This is an ideal introduction to the writings of St. Josemaria Escriva.  I picked up a (print) copy of The Way while I was reading this book, and coming to it already well-versed with how Catholic spiritual training works, I find The Way to be awesome.  I’m thrilled to have been pointed in that direction.  But I’d caution you: Do not read The Way without first reading Sammons’ book or some other similar work.  Taken out of context, St. Josemaria’s collected comments are a recipe for scruples, misunderstanding, and stomping off in a fit of exasperation or despair.  Combined with a healthy, balanced view of Christian spirituality, enlightened by a work like Sammons’, The Way becomes the perfect ’round-the-house spiritual cattle-prod  — think Imitation of Christ, Football Coach Version.

Conclusion: Highly Recommended for Catholics for ready to grow in their spiritual life, and looking for an approachable, step-by-step walk through how to go about it.

What can you learn from a homeschool drop-out?

My latest at CatholicMom.com: What Can You Learn from a Homeschooling Dropout?  Because people who don’t homeschool have some good insights for those of us who do.  Enjoy!

Kolbe Reviews: National Catholic Reader

Click the picture to see the whole series.

The National Catholic Reader is a series of graded readers originally published in the late 1800’s.   They are similar to the McGuffey readers which were popular in the same era; both series are used among homeschoolers today.  Like a modern reading book, the goal is to create a collection of texts which challenge the reader academically, and which impart the values of their time.  Like a modern reading book, the collected reading texts vary in quality from trite to sublime.

I was using McGuffy prior to enrolling with Kolbe, and was happy to switch over to an explicitly-Catholic series.  But the fact that I unschooled with historical readers tells you a bit about my tastes.

First let it be said: I’m not it in for the saccharine chicken-soup-for-farmhand’s-soul poems and morality tales.  They are the bane of any reading book, and inescapable, for the obvious reason that some people love the stuff.  But for all these might induce a coughing fit in the born-curmudgeon, there are three reasons I like using historical text books:

1.  Students learn to read an older style of language.  The classics are less intimidating if you are already familiar with the usage of previous eras.

2. They shed light on their period.  As historical documents, they are an invaluable insight into late 19th century American life.

3. They call into question the values of our present time.  Very specifically, I like that my kids are presented with a whole world whose priorities and values are utterly opposite much of what we accept as commonplace today.  Not because I think the 19th century was the pinnacle of human achievement, but because it is important not to think that 2012 is Only Way It’s Ever Been.  Here’s an example:

In the second-grade reader, there’s a just-so story about kindness and Providence.  It opens by telling us about two girls, ages five and seven, who have just been orphaned.  They have no relations, except an uncle in a distant village whom no one has heard from in years — he may or may not be alive.   A kindly farmer has an errand in the general direction of the village.  He drives the girls until their ways part, and then drops them off to walk the rest of the way alone.

Think about that.  Last year my 5th grade son was brought home to me by the police because he was out wandering our neighborhood.  (Taking down Lost Cat signs, as it happens).  The officer was polite, and clear that we had done nothing wrong.  All the same, he felt obliged to drive the child home.

This is why I like to use these books.

***

Kolbe sells a study booklet (separate from the course plans) which has reading comprehension questions for the student about each lesson.  The corresponding teacher’s manual has the answers.  The Course Plans assign sixth-graders one or two selections to be read each day, Monday through Thursday.  In 4th Grade, students do lessons from the NCR two days a week, and do outside reading (student’s choice) the other two days.   In 4th Grade the vocabulary course plans include additional words from the NCR, though not necessarily from that week’s lesson.   For those not enrolled with Kolbe, I’d save the money and just type up your own set of assignments.

The course plans often call for memorizing poems.  I know it’s good for the growing brain, and all that.  But I can only bring myself to make my kids memorize things I’d want stuck in my own head.  (See “chicken soup”, above.)  So we frequently skip the memorization thing.

The quarterly exams in the course plans consist of a reading selection from McGuffey’s Reader, with comprehension questions similar to the ones the student has been answering throughout the quarter.  If you are enrolled with Kolbe but your student is using McGuffey for a reading book instead of the NCR, Kolbe recommends you contact them for an alternate set of exams.

Because the exams do not depend on having completed any particular set of readings, it is very easy to skip or substitute selected readings in order to lighten the course load or concentrate on some other interest.

***

The reading level in the later grades is fairly elevated.   One of the sixth grade assignments (and a fun one!) was to act out Shakespeare’s farewell from Wolsey to Cromwell.  In earlier years the texts are more garden-variety stories for children, but by Book Six the selections move firmly into history and spiritual memoir, including meditations on great moments in the history of civilization from ancient times forward.  Great moments you the product of our nation’s public schools may never have known happened.

Because the later books are very mature, there’d be nothing wrong with spreading out Book Six to be used through seventh and eighth grade.  (You could use them into high school, but by then the literature course is itself quite demanding.  The National Catholic Reader is an excellent preparation for the type of reading that will be required throughout high school with Kolbe,  Mother of Divine Grace, or the like.)

One caution:  There is ample room for cultural misunderstandings.   Make sure your sixth grader knows the meaning of the word “niggardly”   lest he mistakenly believe the book is written by bigots.

***

That’s all I know to say.  What questions do you have?

Mothers, Teachers, Plans and Purposes

My Hail Mary post at Sarah R.’s place is up.  What I discovered writing it, is that I’d been looking at this question of feminine genius all backward.  Our culture wants us to look at men, and try to guess how women compare.  But just ask Adam — it’s the other way around.  He was adrift until he discovered Eve.  What, after all, is the purpose of tending the garden and taking care of creation, and all the other amazing and wonderful things guys do?  What is the work of Christ, the bridegroom, done in service to His bride, the Church?  He makes her mission possible.  That is, Christ and the Church have a single mission.

BTW I stuck the photo up big, here, so you can see that girl-smile.  It doesn’t quite come across when posted in moderation, the way sensible blog-owners do.

***

I’ve got an article in the new issue of Mater et Magistra.  I haven’t seen the final (edited) version, so I can’t tell you exactly all the parts that made the cut.  [You never know how many words there will be room for, once all the articles for the month are gathered together.  So I submitted my article divided into sub-sections so it would be easy to edit down in chunks.]

But anyhow, it’s pure accountant-frugality meets homeschool-desperation: How do you decide what books to buy?  Don’t panic, I don’t advise anyone to act like I do and buy waaaaaay too many books.  Instead I actually talked with a bunch of much more sensible and practical homeschool moms, and found out what does and does not work in real life, for staying sane and under-budget, and still getting school done.

Let me know what you think when you read it, I’ll happily post your thoughts here.

***

I haven’t figured out how to get my Amazing Catechists feed working quite right, but one day I will.  Meanwhile, I posted about Journals & the Sacrament of Confession this week.  Because a real live human being (who I don’t know personally, and I have no idea when or where or how the incident took place) asked my opinion on this:

Is it appropriate for religion teachers to ask students about their sins?  In my friend’s  religion class, the teacher asked him to write in his journal about one of the sins he would be confessing at his next confession.  What do you think?

No, seriously.  I didn’t make that up.   I can write fiction, but there are limits.  And anyway, I don’t do horror.

3.5 Time Outs: On Tour

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who pulled the ol’ you-vacationed-where?? trick on me.  Works every time. I’m easy to surprise.

Click and be amazed.

1.

We unplugged for Triduum, and wow:  Peaceful.  But look, the power of scheduling made it look like I was on the internet: In Defense of Pretty Good Schools, at CatholicMom.com. Technically it’s a homeschooling column (because that’s how I tricked Lisa H. into letting me write for her — I said, “Gosh, do you need any homeschooling columnists?”), but actually it’s for everyone.

2.

Remember that whole girl problem I was having before?  That Christian LeBlanc answered so easily, like he always does? I stole his answer, of course.  He’ll probably cringe when he sees what I went and did with it.  My post on the word “Women” goes up at Sarah R.’s blog on Thursday morning.  She says she likes it.  But if you want something really smart, with Doctors of the Church and all that, you’d better just read Jeff Miller’s post about “Among”.  Or for a reflection about intimacy and Old English, you’d want Julie Davis on “Thou”.

But Sarah’s going to be nice to me at least until Friday, because her Catholic Family Fun book tour visits right here at this blog, when I’ll be reviewing her book in seven quick takes, for the other evil overlord who we won’t mention just now.  What you need to know today: It’s good enough I actually bought a copy with my own money to give as a gift to somebody.  Admittedly I buy a lot of books.  But when I acquire a second copy, that’s your hint.

3.

Look, more things for smart people:  Barbara Nicolosi let us post the transcript of her workshop on “Towards a Literature that is Catholic” at CWG.  I think maybe she doesn’t read the Hardy Boys much, because she says things like:

My theory is that the secular world is not anti-Catholic as much as it is anti-bad art.

Me, on the other hand, I’m all about bad art*.  Then again, I’m not real secular.

3.5

In more book tour excitement, this coming Monday I’m reviewing Karina Fabian’s Live and Let Fly, and let me tell you, it is absolutely . . .

 

***

Well, that’s all for today.  It’s Link Day once again, which is not an obligation, just an opportunity.  Because no one likes having their perfectly good link stuck in my inbox with a little star next to it, when it could be down in the combox for everyone to enjoy.  One link per comment so you don’t get accidentally caught in the spam dungeon, where even detective dragons dare not prowl.

And hey, Happy Easter!

*This is not a strictly factual statement.  I’m good with hokey genre fiction as long as the story is fun and entertaining, though I reserve the right to joke about it over a cup of coffee with the boy afterwards.  But even I have my limits.

Kolbe Reviews: Vocabulary and Composition

In Part 1: I tell you about the Vocabulary Book.

In Part 2: I speculate about Composition.

Kolbe uses the Sadlier-Oxford Vocabulary Workshop series.  If you used a vocabulary book in middle or high school, it’s just like that.

Each chapter introduces a set of unrelated vocabulary words with definitions.  There are exercises to help the student learn to use the word.  At the end of the chapter, Kolbe directs you to give a spelling test and then have the student use the words in original sentences.  A teacher’s manual is available, but it never occurred to me to look for one.

My kids work through their books independently 95% of the time.  My 6th grader finds it easy, even relaxing.  The 4th grader sometimes has questions, and needed some coaching through the first set of exercises on analogies.  You can use the book as a consumable or not — it is easier on both student and teacher if you let the kid write in the book, but not impractical to write answers on a separate sheet of paper.  I relented and let my fourth grader write in hers, because she found the back-and-forth overwhelming.

Useful Tip: See if you can get hold of a used copy of Spelling Power.

We lucked into an older edition a few years ago.  It has massively detailed, well-researched instructions for how to help students learn to spell.  Having used the method for a couple years, the kids now know how to study a word.  It makes a difference.  I do know a mom who found that although SP worked great for her first three kids, her youngest child needed to study words grouped by spelling rule.  Having memorized the method by then, she sold her copy of SP and got out a rhyming dictionary for creating word lists.

There may be other good resources for teaching the methods of learning to spell.  If you know of one, please share a link.  But this one I’ve used and found it informative and helpful.

The Course Plans

The fourth grade course plans for vocabulary include a list of words from the National Catholic Reader to be copied, defined, and studied for the vocabulary test.  My fourth grader was getting bogged down and frustrated, and so we took the advice at the introduction to the course plans and now do only the words in the vocabulary book itself.

The fourth grade course plans assign work for each day according a set method for studying (pre-test, exercises, study, graded test).  If you are not enrolled in Kolbe,  I would skip these plans and just devise your own.   (If you want the convenience of everything all written up for you, enroll.)

The sixth grade course plans assign work from the vocabulary book three days a week, and on the fourth day, an assignment from the Sadlier Writing Workshop Level A.  You could comfortably skip the plans and assign pages yourself without difficulty.

When I bought books, I failed to realize we needed the writing book.  So I took out the boy’s copy of Voyages in English and used the composition portion of that text to write a set of assignments for each Thursday of the year.  Thus I have no idea what’s in the regular book.

More Composition Programs I Know Nothing About

This fall Kolbe rolled out a new Classical Composition program.  You can only read about the fourth grade program on the Kolbe site, because no matter what grade you begin, the instruction is to start with Year1 of the program.  Here is the publisher’s info at Memoria Press, which provides some more details, though it looks like even there, information is limited.

Now let me start by saying that I don’t go in for this hyped-up We’re So Historic Look At Us Being Classical thing.  I’m utterly unmoved by someone using words like “Fable Stage” and “Narrative Stage”.  You could as soon call it “Minty Fresh” and “Tastes Great Less Filling”, and I’d be just as convinced.

–> But when I see the course descriptions in the Kolbe catalog, this looks exactly like what I find new writers need to learn.  I say this based on my experience with editing, critiquing, and bringing grown-ups to the point where they can write clearly and well.*

I just took a look at the pdf preview of the student guide, and it looks kind of painful.  But thorough.  Seriously thorough.  This is what editors do to people.  If you want to write well, this is the process.

Done with too much intensity, however, I find children can quickly learn to hate writing.  On the other hand, the methodical approach to working with words may appeal to some students who freeze up at Creativity On Demand.

Looking at the rigor of the program, I have mixed feelings about who would really benefit most from this course, and how parents ought to teach from it.  If anyone has any experience you’d like to share, please do.

*This is the point where I congratulate myself for not using swear words and “five paragraph essay” in the same sentence.  It’s an insult to the swear words.