[ellies mom]

Up front, I should mention that I don't really homeschool. My daughter goes to public school. I supplement what she learns in school with activities that either give practice for things she needs to work on or allows her to further explore the things she is interested in.

When my oldest was really struggling with her handwriting, I made the attempt to separate penmanship from creative writing. So I encouraged a lot of writing on the computer. Sometimes I'd have her dictate to me what she wanted to say and sometimes, I'd let her hunt and peck and write it herself. There are a billion different ways you can encourage writing that is fairly "painless". For example, you could have him write a family newsletter once a week talking about what the family has been doing and what the family will be doing. My daughter has a blog. It is kept private so only invited people can read it. It is a fun way for her relatives to get a peek into her life. Every week at school, they write a letter home in the family letter journal and then we write a letter back. This summer, she has a writing journal. And each week, she has a couple of writing activities she can chose from. For example "Picnic or Restaurant? and why?" or in your case "research catapults and write 3-5 sentences about something you've learned." Or maybe you can have him write a story/report on the merits of his favorite bionicle and how it would fare against another one. Or you could give him story prompts and see where he takes the story. My mom got my oldest a neat book (the series is called "Write me a Story). It had a bunch of stickers and each page had 1-3 squares and then several lines. The idea was that she would put some stickers in the square and then write a story about what is going on in the stickers. You could find funny pictures and have him write about the picture. You could have him draw/write a comic book. To make it extra fun, you could get him special comic book paper. And then publish it for the family.

As far as spelling, this is what her teacher wrote in the front of their first family letter journal.

The purpose of the family journal is to give your child a meaningful way to practice writing skills. You will notice that your child will use both conventional and temporary spelling. As the year progresses, their spelling will continue to improve with many words spelled conventionally. However, be prepared to see a mix of spelling in their writing. This will show that your child is developing as a writer. We encourage temporary spelling because it allows children to develop as writers.

The way it was explained to me was that young children who really focused on spelling words correctly tended to use simpler vocabulary while writing because they typically stuck to words they could spell. While children who used "temporary" spelling used a larger variety of words. What her teacher did was to give them a short list of "no excuse" words. These were words like "the", "and", whatever that they had to spell correctly. As the year went on, the list got longer. She also gave them a laminated sheet with common words that they could refer to and eventually as the child was ready she gave them a "spelling dictionary" so that they could write down the harder words that they wanted to use. For example, if they wanted to use "appreciate", the teacher would tell them how to spell it, they would write it in their dictionary and then they could refer to it later on. But as the kids read more and write more, they tend to pick up on some of the correct spelling just out of familiarity and practice.