Writing Class or playing with shapes?

Homeschooling is usually a measurable accomplishment or failure. If you childs complete his or her math in a reasonable amount of time and gets most of them correct or all of them for that matter you know they are moving along and understanding the materials. Math, English, spelling, vocabulary are subjects that are measured. Science and History are measurable too but so many of us put our own opinions in these two classes that sometimes we get a not so accurate picture of what is going on, but still they learn something. However Writing is a whole different subject. Writing is very subjective. Did you know that Writing class was never a subject in school back in the early days? Why did we put it in? Well maybe because they realized that all of us need to learn to write and to put our words on paper. However this is a very hard subject to teach. What you think is good writing and at what level is different from what I think is good writing and at what level. There in lies the rub and the problem most homeschooling moms have with writing. We struggle at this one subject more than any other unless we are true writing scholars ourselves.

So that being said, I have ventured upon a writing class that several of us homeschooling moms are taking provided by a local homeschool mom who loves grammar, writing, and even has a college degree in English and minor in journalism. I feel she has enough credit to move on. So we paid our fees and off we went and the kids and I were stunned that the first class had no writing in it involved at all. We played games. Its called the communication game. She explained to us that writing is simply communicating your ideas, thoughts, and imagination to your reader. However so many of us struggle with getting it down on paper, so we did it out loud during our game.

She had one person draw on a piece of paper anything rather simple using lines and shapes. That person (who we call the writer) would try to communicate to the listner (the reader) what they drew and the writer was responsible for communicating it just so that the reader could draw exactly what the writer did. So off we go. Sarah and I did it together and Zech and Isabella did theirs. The first time through you could ask questions. For example when they said draw a big line, well how big is big? Where do you draw the line? The second time through you could ask no questions and just had to depend upon the writers communication skills. You get the picture. This is very difficult to do because the writers choice of words is very important to get their idea accross of what they drew. Then we played a variation of this game with pattern blocks (or shapes). One person had to create something with their pattern blocks and then proceed in telling the person what they created and that person had to recreate it from their communication skills. Wow, it taught us tons about how we communicate and how we need to be more specific and exact with our words. Without writing anything down we learned so much about writing! Can you tell from the picture that Zech didn't communicate specifically something and the Isabella's shapes didn't come out just right?

So the next time you pick up a pen and paper or start to type anything pay attention to the words you choose and hope they connect with your reader on what idea you are trying to convey! Happy writing!