She's only 13, but already she has published six books on Kindle

Ellie Firestone, the pen name of my daughter "Phoenix", has just published her sixth book on Kindle. 

Super Sporty: The Curse of the Delba is the fourth in a series about super-hero, basketball-playing horses.

For only pocket-money prices, the latest book is available as a Kindle edition and perfect for emerging readers or any pre-schooler who enjoys a read-aloud before bedtime.

Buy it in the UK from here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Super-Sporty-Curse-Delba-ebook/dp/B00ER7IRS4/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1377538320&sr=8-2&keywords=ellie+firestone

Or from the US from here:

http://www.amazon.com/Super-Sporty-Curse-Delba-ebook/dp/B00ER7IRS4/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1377539173&sr=8-5&keywords=super+sporty+4

I'm just so proud of her in so many ways -- true to Charlotte-Mason-method homeschoolers, she finishes her school work in the morning, then spends her afternoons with her writing projects.  

Whether it's drawing and colouring the illustrations, editing the stories, coding the html, designing the next Scratch game tie-in, or even sewing plush toys of the main characters, Ellie is in complete control of her product from beginning to end, and I can't think of a better way to learn about a career.

Ellie's toys compared to their book illustrations

Please hop on over to your respective Amazon and get a copy of Ellie's latest book today. Your young readers will really enjoy them, and you'll not only be buying a book that instills the value of team work (always the theme of the Super Sporty series), you'll be supporting and encouraging a fellow homeschooler!

Remember:  If you don't have a Kindle, you can still get Kindle books for your computer, iPad, or Smart phone -- and then you're able to see the wonderful illustrations in full colour!

Phoenix does it Again -- New Kindle Titles

Phoenix, who publishes under the pen name Ellie Firestone, has published a new book on Amazon Kindle, called The Misadventure of Bolingbroke Manor.

A New Interactive Mystery for Kindle

It's an interactive mystery, which means the reader can choose what happens next by clicking a link in the book, and then finding out what consequences that decision creates.

Interactive books are nothing new, but sometimes, a bit fiddly to "turn to page 73".  This Kindle version instantly moves to the next scene of the book with only one click of the link.

Not clear?  Let me illustrate by showing you the first page of the story (you'll have to click on the image of the text to make it big enough to read ... at least, I would have to!):

As usual, Phoenix sells her book at pocket money prices, wanting to make Kindle books for kids an accessible opportunity both in terms of price and in terms of content.  

New titles are coming soon -- more interactive stories, as well as another volume in the Super Sporty series, and Spanish translations of the two shorter stories she has already published, Super Emmy: Introducing Splodge, and Super Sporty: Signed, Anonymous.

Why not check out her author's blog and sign up to receive notices in your inbox?

Planning for the New Academic Year

Some people love Christmas.  Some people love Spring.  I love the weeks just before the new school year, when I call up my spreadsheets and download all my book lists and sort out the schedule for the kids.

I'm nearing completion on Phoenix's weekly schedule.  Hers is the most complicated because she is going to start Ambleside Online for Year 7.  It looks pretty challenging, but the best fit to go along with our fortnightly history co-op that's studying Our Island Story.

Yr 7 is great for this because it looks at the Middle Ages in greater depth than Our Island Story, so she'll be reading books by Churchill about the Birth of Britain, selections from the Venerable Bede, and lots of mediaeval literature, amongst many, many others.

She's even got readings from Charlotte Mason herself: character study in Ms Mason's book "Ourselves".

Exciting, therefore, that the new CM Live! on-line co-op class is going to allow her to discuss these challenging works with her global peers.

Why not have a look at the on-line co-op for your own pre-teen?

One of the things I've been contemplating this year is Phoenix's copywork selections.  Do I carry on with the Yr 7 selections as provided by former Yr 7 mums, a collection of sayings and paragraphs adding up to 129 pages?

Or do I take a leaf out of my own book (see earlier blog post about Killer's copywork) when it comes to encouraging quality of quantity?

Truth be told, Phoenix's handwriting is fluid but messy. She has been trained in the Getty-Dubay italic hand (a choice made because it seems more universal than the various cursive options), but penmanship is leaning toward poor.

Ages ago, I bought Penny Gardner's little book about Italic Handwriting.  She has since put out another edition, and it seems like her additions to the original are downloadable for free on her website.

Within this supplement are, I think, selections to practice, and so Plan A this year is for Phoenix to tackle these quotations in a methodical and exacting way with the aim of improving her penmanship.

I feel another "before" and "after" post, so watch this space as things progress.

Boys and Copywork

Killer is my oldest boy; he's 9.  He follows the Ambleside Online curriculum (sort of) and, as it adheres to the Charlotte Mason method, he has a daily expectation that he does something called copywork.

In a nutshell, copywork is copying down an extract from another source, such as a good poem or a selection from a book or even from the Bible.  The idea is that a child can practice writing neatly, can learn from a good example about punctuation, spelling, and grammar, and can do so in context (in other words, in a realistic setting and not as a list of random words, or as a fill-in-the-blank workbook).

Recently, a friend of mine with a boy the same age was asking me about how much should be expected of her son, as she and her husband were nearly coming to blows about the number of words they were making the child write down every day, and the child was coming unglued because it seemed too much for him.

Try to make writing a pleasant experience

Just before I "reveal" my answer to her, let me just give a bit of background about Killer and his friend.  Neither one likes to write much.  In years past, Killer absolutely refused to write, unless perhaps it was a caption to one of his stick-figure montages.  His map-skills workbooks, which he loves, are filled with the first letters of all his answers, rather than the complete words -- so, for example, if the answer were "Red Bull Boulevard", his book says "R B B".

His older sister used to devour the Getty-Dubay series of handwriting workbooks, and Killer never touched them.

He finally agreed to some handwriting practice when I bought Teodorescu's excellent book called Write from the Start (though, if you look it up, you'll see there's much more about shapes and doodles and fluid lines than there is about letters per se).

Never the less, this year I decided to leap into AO properly and expect him to undertake copywork.  I decided to use Joyce Herzog's Bible Quotes, which I've owned for years but hadn't dusted off in a while.

I was slightly worried that she starts off in such a basic way, but considering my son was writing practically nothing last year, and was stuck in an all-caps rut, I decided softly-softly might be the best approach. Here, for example, is his first entry for copywork in September 2011.

Writing nearly every day, and letting his handwriting develop organically with, perhaps, occasional side-by-side discussions of how to make letters flow together more smoothly, this is how he's writing in May 2012:

Not only is he writing more fluidly, writing longer passages, and getting all the usual benefits from copywork, he is also doing so without any complaints, arguments, tantrums, or anxieties.

Therefore, I want to encourage you if you currently have a non-writer.  Little and often.  Patience.  It isn't about quantity, but about quality, and letting the child have a pleasant experience while he or she is doing it so they don't baulk at this amazing and wonderful opportunity to learn to write organically.

NaNoWriMo Takes Over

"I may be some time"

Legend has it that these were the last words of Captain Scott during his ill-fated Antarctic expedition.  Right now, they're going to be mine, as I embark on National Novel Writing Month.

In order to produce a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, I think I will have to put my nose to the writing grindstone.

In the meantime, have a look at the NaNoWriMo site for its free writing workbooks for kids.

See you in December.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with a snapshot from our trip to Stonehenge yesterday.

Try Making Books to Encourage Writing

In my previous post on this blog, I wrote about why boys don't like to write, and gave some suggestions for encouraging them to do so.

Then I came across a faded old copy of an out-of-print book called "An Experiment in Education" by Sybil Marshall which had another excellent idea.

Just before I explain her suggestion, I want to spend a few lines in praise of this old book.  Yes, it was written in 1963 and chronicles over thirty years of teaching in a one-room schoolhouse near Cambridge in England, but her insights into juggling multiple ages in a single classroom are the stuff of beauty for homeschooling parents.  She is particularly good about using art for educational purposes, but I shall say more about that in a future blog entry as I experiment in my own home a bit more.

Meanwhile, back to boys and writing.  In my previous post, one of the suggestions I made for getting boys to write involved diagramming or drawing first, then writing about the drawing second.  I said "think map instead of a list of directions."

Marshall's description of making homemade books is similar, and though I haven't yet put it into practice, seems pedagogically sound.

Very sound.

Basically, each child should be given a blank booklet, perhaps made of 4 or 8 pieces of paper folded in half and stapled in the middle, and if you want to make it slightly more permanent, wrap a piece of coloured card around the outside as a cover before you staple it all together.

The child should designate the little book as a story from the beginning -- a trip to a farm, a day at the zoo, what the frogs are doing in the pond right now, or even something entirely fanciful (Marshall gives the example of a little girl who imagined herself as a cat who went on magical adventures, such as going to the moon, to the circus, to the seaside).

Then *daily*, children should draw a picture in their book to go with their story.  If they aren't good writers yet, then they should take the book to the teacher/parent and dictate what they want written under the picture.  You could vary this by dotting the letters for the child to trace, or dictating the spelling of words while the child writes them him-/herself.

One of Phoenix's first books:
note that mummy wrote the words
(click on image to enlarge)

As fluency progresses, children will be able to write their own words for their stories, and from these could come a few choice discussions about spelling, punctuation, grammar.  If the words are in pencil, these corrections can be made by the child, but perhaps not insisted upon so you don't throw water on their fire.  A separate booklet for grammar, spelling, etc, would probably be better if you feel the need for something more formal.

This process seems to mirror that which my oldest child, who is now 10, followed naturally, but I can see the good sense in having little books as a daily assignment for all the children.  I'll post in the future about how I get on.

Killer demonstrates the process
of drawing first, writing last

One cautionary note: Marshall points out that the process is best when it's drawing before writing, and not the other way around.  As she writes: "Thought must precede written work, and the picture first serves to inspire and then order thought, so that the words flow with confidence and clarity afterwards."  She admits that illustrating a story once the words are already written is "pleasant", but has less value -- "if the words have been satisfying enough in their own right, the very sensitive child may even be irked by being asked to do the same thing twice."  (Both quotes are from p. 143 of the 1968 CUP edition)

(Sybil Marshall died in 2005.  Her obituary can be read here).

Why do (most) boys hate writing?

One of the most common complaints I hear from parents about boys -- whether they're home educated or at schools -- is that they don't want to write anything.

Why do (most) boys hate to write so much?

The short answer is that boys develop later in that area of the brain. In fact, research has shown than girls' brains develop in the region of language and fine motor skills about six years earlier than boys!  On the flip side, boys develop their spatial memory areas about four years earlier than girls.

Unfortunately, our expectations as educators are geared more toward writing than spatial memory, and so the boys get labeled or pushed too hard too early.

 Is it any wonder they can develop a hang-up about writing?

Logic states, therefore, that boys should be allowed to develop more slowly in this area, and in the meantime, be provided with opportunities and strategies that can help them achieve as writers at their level!

Here are a few ideas based on experience with my own boys, aged 3 and 8:

• Use the computer.  Because boys develop earlier in their spatial skills than their literacy skills, they might find it easier to write using a keyboard than trying to form letters with a pencil.  Further, writing on a word processor is less permanent and easier to correct, so boys needn't be too worried about mistakes (and who hasn't had to deal with a tantrum when something didn't work out just so??!!).  An ICT educator recently told me that the schools in her district were going to explore this link in a bid to improve boys' literacy, so it's an idea that seems to be gathering some momentum.
• Handwriting practice.  "Killer" has rejected most handwriting programmes, some with violence and/or chucking books into the rubbish bin.  Getty-Dubay italic book A was thrown across the room.  Draw, Write, Now has the right idea -- drawing pictures and writing a two sentence caption underneath.  Unfortunately, that was still too many words as far as Killer was concerned, so I got many well-drawn pictures and no writing.  Our success story has been Write from the Start by Teodorescu -- a handwriting programme that's more about connecting dots, drawing circles around triangles, and practising curves.  Killer and Timmy both get their respective books out in their spare time.  You might ask if a handwriting programme is necessary at all, and I would probably say it isn't; however, the Teodorescu book allows us to tick that box without ticking each other off.
• Let him dictate. We're eclectic homeschoolers who err on the side of Charlotte Mason method, so I check on the children's comprehension of our reading materials by getting them to "narrate", or tell back, what I've just read.  This is primarily oral narration from the age of 7-11, or until a child is fluent enough in writing that his/her skills in handwriting won't disadvantage the thoughts making it to the page.  Phoenix, for example, is capable of writing her own narration.  Killer, on the other hand, will dictate his narration to me, which allows me to save some of his work on paper without coming to blows about the way in which that work gets processed.
• Copywork. This is another hallmark of the Charlotte Mason method.  Some might argue it's an unnecessary battle, but I like how it helps a child learn well-written sentences, good vocabulary, and complicated spelling, in a natural way.  Any Charlotte Mason book or website will tell you more about it, but here's an example.  My advice when it comes to boys? Keep it short.  Keep it large.  Offer a reward such as some computer time when he completes this along with three or four other topics, or break up the writing skills with a game, some dancing, some outdoor play.  

• Use movable alphabets.  These are individual letters cut out of thick card, usually with the vowels in blue and the consonants in red.  They're excellent for training young children to read, but also useful for the reluctant boy to practise spelling and writing without having to use fine motor skills which he may find difficult still.  Here is an article about using movable alphabets, and also a very good Montessori book about teaching reading and writing which includes more detail and exercises for the younger child.
• Diagram, or draw first.  If you think about it, this is common sense.  In their shoes, you would want to draw something with a great deal of detail and action and excitement, everything happening at once, rather than write a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence explanation.  Think map rather than a list of directions and you may see what I mean. 
• Read Michael Gurian's book "The Mind of Boys" for more excellent tips and the science behind them.

The bottom line is that we're wrong when we think boys aren't that good at writing.  They certainly *can* be good at writing, but maybe not when we want them to be.   It's a matter of being patient with them.  Remember, Charlotte Mason, the Victorian educator and theorist, didn't have her children write their narrations till they were at least 11.  

Perhaps we shouldn't either.