 Hey everybody, welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is a homeschool show and tell. The homeschool show and tell is an open collaboration hosted by Abby from Rooted and Rest and Myself. Our goal with the homeschool show and tell was really just to show that there's not one right way to homeschool. And we do that by bringing homeschoolers together each month from around the world to share their specific take on a different topic. This month's topic is our favorite subjects. Now in the past I have shared Emily's favorite subject and kind of our collective favorite subject at the time for our family, which I will link them up here in case you're curious to see those. But I thought this month I would share my personal favorite subject to teach. And this has not always been my favorite subject to teach and I'll explain more later, but it is currently my absolute favorite. And that is writing. Yes, you heard me right. I have a role-actant writer. Writing was absolutely miserable in our homeschool for years. I mean like full on tears bashing our heads against the table miserable. Emily hated doing it. And anytime I would ask her to, it was just absolutely miserable. And the sad thing about that is she was a beautiful storyteller. She had an amazing writer's voice, but anytime I would ask her to take the pen and put it to the paper, her voice was like squelched because she would tell these elaborate stories. And then all of a sudden she was restricted to only being able to write what she could physically write. And so I actually started writing her stories down. For her, I started doing the majority of her writing for her, even her math writing. If she would say, mom, will you write it for me? I would absolutely do it because I realized that I was killing her in our writer voice and that she was going to end up hating and writing writing if we kept on the path that we were on. So we stopped all forms of writing in any kind of curriculum, academic book type of way for a very, very long time. Until I figured out a way to bring it into our homeschool in a real world way and make it fun. And that is what made all the difference. The first way that I did that was we started something that I like to call Mail Time Monday. So we started spending every Monday sitting down together, which was a huge part of this because I did not want her to feel like it was me adding pressure by sitting there staring at her doing an assignment. Instead, we did it side by side. So we would sit down, we would read any letters that we had gotten, we would write letters, we would write cards, we would draw pictures. We sent birthday cards and we sent holiday cards and we wrote letters to friends and family. I wrote thank you cards to people, get well cards or hey, just dropping you a note cards and she did the same. And what started out as her just maybe drawing a heart and writing I love you turned into her writing pages and pages of heart felt meaningful letters to friends and family because we took the pressure out and we just made it more fun for her. And so that was the first kind of step towards me and her both enjoying writing again in our homeschool. After that, I started incorporating more writing resources in fun ways. So I really wanted to make sure that she kind of recaptured and re-experienced that writer's voice that I had tried to squelch previously by forcing her to write. And so I did that with a lot of storytelling based games because I knew that I needed her to remember what it was like to be a storyteller. So some of our favorite storytelling games that we use to kind of encourage that are the Rory Story Cubes. We have almost all of them. The original, the Fantasia, which is fantasy, the actions and the voyages. And so we would just kind of take turns rolling the dice, telling the story, adding to it. We would sometimes pick a few cubes from each and you know like, okay, this is gonna start the story, this is gonna be the middle and the end. And sometimes I would even write her stories down because they would be so good. I would wanna make sure that we kind of kept and captured those amazing stories. I did not make her write them though. Not in the beginning. I would do all of the writing for her. In addition to the Rory Story Cubes, my other really, really like long time favorite are the Eboo storytelling cards. Now I have a couple of different sets here. I love how simple they are. They're just big, kind of open ended pictures. They're a ton of different. Let's see, I think this is the Animal Village. We have a fairy tale version here. They have this fairy tale mix ups. They have like a volcano one. There's tons of different topics that you can get in the story cards, but they're just beautiful images. And so again, we would just lay a couple of ones out. We'd randomly draw. We'd take turn telling stories. We would add on to each other's story. We just really spent time playing with storytelling and really capturing that creative writer's voice again. And then the last game that we played Eitan, and it is still a top favorite of Emily's, is the Tall Tales. This game is the infinite storytelling game. It comes with 24, kind of like location or environment cards, if you will. So you have all of these different environments that your story can take place in. And then you get this bag full of little story pieces. I mean, it's so many things. Like there's a little barn and here's a little fire. So you have no idea what you're gonna draw. And then there's also, which we now own, an environment expansion pack that you can buy. So we bought that to really expand the game so that we could do any more. So now we have 48 environments and 50 game pieces. And again, we would take turns telling stories. We would add on to the stories. We would do a lot of different things with it to just really make sure that we were kind of recapturing and helping her re-find that writer's voice that I had unfortunately helped her to lose. And then after that, I started looking out for like some fun writing, things that would guide her writing slightly but that weren't really, really daunting. And the thing that I found that ended up being our favorite were the Usborne writing series books. These are so much fun. The first one that we started with was the My First Story Writing book. And then you have the Write Your Own Story book. Now she actually hasn't done this one yet so I can show you in it a little bit. It's not overwhelming. So it's just kind of like, you can see here you're gonna make a character. And then once you make the character you're gonna maybe write a story about them. Here's a time travel. So it gives you kind of tips and tricks but it's only two pages worth of writing. So it's not overwhelming. And there's like, you know, little ticks and trips and kind of help. So like here's Giving Your Stories a great title. So it just gives you some ideas and it's fun. Along with those, they have some more specialized ones. So write your own poems, write your own scripts, write and design your own magazines and then Emily somewhere has a Write Your Own Comic book. She's actually in the process of doing that currently and I couldn't find it for this video but there is a comic book one too. And so they all kind of have that walk you through step by step, little bit of like bite-sized pieces type of writing that makes it a little more fun for the kids. This year I decided I wanted to add even more writing to our homeschool but again in a fun way. Something we could do together, not something that I was sitting there watching her doing, adding pressure. And so that is when I came up with journaling. Something that we would do side by side a way to make memories together, a way to kind of document our learning and a way to really focus on that personal writing from her because we had been working on friendly writing and note writing and letters and stuff with mail time and I really loved the idea of starting personal writing. And so we have been journaling together all year and I absolutely love the memories that we have made and you can see here, I'll show you the very first one that she ever did. It was not a ton of writing. We journal kind of like in a scrapbook diary type of way. We have tons of different things that we use. I have a video on this so I will link it up here for you guys. So you can see that when we first started she wasn't doing a ton of writing, but it was some. And then as we continued her writing got longer, she got more confident. She started writing more in her journal. Let's see. I can find a more recent one. Well, this one has a ton of pictures, but so there wasn't a lot of room left for writing, but she's gotten so much better with that. And then I do similar, I do the same thing. I'll just show you a random spread in mine. So we just write what's going on, things that have happened, things we're learning, trips we're going on, we print out pictures. It's just been a great educational academic thing to add to our homeschool, but also a great connection. We've loved connecting with each other. I love that we're celebrating the small things. The benefits that have come from it have been amazing. So if you're not journaling in your homeschool I highly recommend that you add that. And then I also started adding some other things in sporadically like this My List project. It's journaling ideas for kids. She might do one of these, you know, every few weeks. And I love that it's simple. So like here's list seven, you can see we haven't gotten very far, we've only done six lists. And this says list all the people who brighten your day. Short, simple, sweet, but kind of again gets her thinking. Let's see here, list 19, circle all of the ways you like to play. So it's kind of journaling inspiration without requiring a ton of physical penmanship from her. And then Emily loves poetry. Like absolutely loves poetry. And I knew that I could sneak in some writing there as well. And so one of the things that has been the biggest help in our homeschool are these poetry adventure books by Brian Cleary. They're so much fun and they're hilarious. And they have different types of poems. So this is Haiku and Lantern poems, List poems, Acrostic poems, so examples like that. In the beginning of the book it tells you kind of what is a list poem or what is an acrostic poem. And then it has about 25 to 30 pages full of hilarious poems that follow kind of that form of poetry. So we've done poetry tea time in our homeschool for years anyway. So the past couple of years we've used these every now and then. I mean, we really focus on a type of poetry or a form of poetry. And then after we've made it through the entire book over a few courses of poetry tea time, we attempt our hand at writing our own type of poem following that form. And so that's been another fun way to encourage her to get some writing in and practice different forms of poetry writing and I do it along with her. And some of her poems are absolutely hilarious, like absolutely hilarious. And so I love again that we're kind of keeping this funny memory of something that we're doing together. A few of the other resources that I really, really like are the 100 short fiction prompts for ages eight to 12. This reminds me of the Usborne books. It's very kind of colorful and short and sweet. It's not overwhelming. There's kind of some tips and tricks along the way. It's bite size, if you will. So I really like that. She doesn't write in this. I give her the things outside of it. I don't know why, but she doesn't want to. I think because it doesn't lay flat. Anyway, and then the last one that I have to share is the Writers Toolbox, which has been a lot of fun too, because we have learned how to write letters, fairy tales, scary stories, journals, poems, and reports because of it. So it's kind of a compilation book. It has each of those books in it. And it's a fun thing to read, especially like when we started Mail Time Monday, we read about the letters and we kind of learned how to write a proper letter. And then the same thing when we started journaling, when we started doing the poetry, we would read that section a couple of times and really learn how to write it kind of properly and the way to do that. Now I do want to leave you with a few tips. And the first tip is if you were trying to start doing some fun writing with your kids, do not correct anything that they write. Or at least I didn't at first. I did not correct it. If she would write a letter and she misspelled every word, I would say, this is great. I would smile and I did not say anything because the first thing that I wanted was for her to enjoy it, which means the last thing I wanted was for her to hate it because I was correcting everything she was doing and sucking the fun out of it. I had sucked the fun out of writing before. I didn't want to do it again. And so I didn't correct her. As time has gone on, she will now ask me, how do you spell this? How do you spell that? Should this be capital? Does this need a period or a comma or whatever? And we've discussed it or I will, even sometimes when I'm writing, even if I am pretty sure I know how to spell a word, if I'm kind of iffy or I'm like, oh, this would be easier if I could see it, especially if I'm writing in pen, I will ask our dot. I will say like, hey, Echo, how do you spell Wednesday? I can spell Wednesday, but as an example. And so I have demonstrated that even I don't know everything and that we can seek out knowledge from the resources that we have around us. Or I will occasionally reference a thesaurus or a dictionary as an example. I don't force it down her throat. I just do it so that she can see that this is how it can be done. And then that way I'm demonstrating and modeling how to do it. And then I've seen her take on that herself. Like, oh, she doesn't know how to spell something. So now she's seeking out a dictionary or a thesaurus or she's asking the Echo or she's asking me. And so even though I have not actively corrected her, every time we've sat down to do some sort of creative writing, I've seen huge, I mean, huge improvements in her spelling and her grammar and her punctuation because she will write and then she'll read it back to us and she'll immediately say, oh, that doesn't sound right. And she'll correct herself. So it's been an amazing experience. I watched a kid who absolutely hated and I really do mean hated, like full on tears writing, grow to love it. Love it to the point that in her free time, she is writing a book, like a really good blow me out of the water, how good it is book. And so I say that to say that if you were in the trenches right now with a kid who hates writing, it won't be that way forever and you can change it. You can make writing fun. And because it is so fun now, it is hands down my favorite subject to teach and to do alongside her. I mean, don't get me wrong. I love our unit studies. I love everything, but because we have come so far because we went from hating it to loving it because most of our writing me and her do side by side, it is my favorite subject. Like I look forward to mail time or journaling or poetry in our homeschool each and every week. Now, I cannot wait to find out what your favorite subject is in your homeschool. So please leave me a comment telling me what your favorite subject to teach is, what your favorite subject maybe for your kids to learn is cause I know those can sometimes be different. And then don't forget to check out the playlist in the description to watch all of the other videos about homeschooling and their favorite subjects.