Write Something Every Day ~ New Book

We are excited to announce the release of our first book — Write Something Every Day: 366 Pencil Sharpeners for Students of Writing.

One of the best pieces of advice we are given is to learn to write by writing:

Homeschoolers are admirably dedicated people, and that very dedication often leads them to choose the hard-work, ineffective approaches rather than the natural, effective approaches. They feel the natural ways are too gentle. They feel they’re not doing a good job unless the work is difficult almost to the point of frustration.

On a chat group, a mom wrote a wonderful line about her curriculum plan. Since I cannot do better, I give you her words.

“For reading we read, for writing we write.”

That is worth memorizing. It is worth posting on a cupboard door for a reminder of what the main core of language is.

The language arts are reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Here we focus on writing, which is closely tied to reading. To learn to write, write. And read a lot. The hard-work voice in your conscience may be asking what about grammar rules. What about vocabulary words? What about topic sentences, phrases, clauses, adverbial sentence openers? And what about spelling correctly? Following those concerns splits writing into too many parts and crowds the schedule with useless work.
“How Not to Teach Writing” by Ruth Beechick

As we have covered here many times, the best way for anyone to learn to write is to put pencil to paper and start writing. The question then becomes, But what to write?

Write Something Every Day is a guide that offers a writing option for each and every day in a year. But more importantly, the writing assignments can be a guide to help you devise your own future writing exercises by following a similar pattern.

The book is meant to be used by students of all ages (obviously, the student must be comfortable using a pencil). Yet, it is NOT a book that can be handed off to a younger child to work through independently. We have included helpful suggestions for modifying the assignments to fit a variety of skills.

Writing skills covered include: