Cindy Downes

Jun. 22, 2005 - Composition

Composition is one of those subjects that is often neglected in schools, both traditional and homeschool. It's a lot easier to give students a fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, true-false worksheet than to correct writing assignments.

Composition skills include writing letters, reports, biographies, essays, research papers, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc. Most traditional Language Arts curriculums spend more time on grammar than on composition, resulting in students who know everything about parts of speech and diagramming sentences, but have very few skills in composition.

As a homeschool parent; however, you can focus two or three days per week on composition practice; and then on the alternate days, use your child's compositions to teach grammar skills. The result will be that your child will not only learn proper grammar, but will also develop essential composition skills.

Your goals for composition instruction should include:

*    Acquire the writing skills to be able to communicate effectively in school, business, and personal applications.
*    Learn to give and take constructive criticism.
*    Learn how authors write and get published.
*    Seek God as to whether or not He has given the student a calling to write.

Here are some general guidelines for composition lessons:

1.    Begin with warmups (resources at http://www.oklahomahomeschool.com/CompCRWarmU.html)

2.    Have a purpose for the writing assignment. Focus on only one or two new techniques per assignment (topic sentences, vivid verbs, idea starters, descriptive paragraph…)

3.    Have an audience for the writing assignment: portfolio, friend, letter to editor, publication.

4.    Let them write what they know about or what interests them.

5.    Have them copy, or write from dictation, portions of great literature. Read this excerpt from Benjamin Franklin's autobiography to see how he used copying to learn to write:

" About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious. " (source: http://earlyamerica.com/lives/franklin/chapt1/)

6.    Spend more time in writing instruction than in grammar workbooks. You can teach grammar using their writing assignments, using simple worksheets as needed, and by teaching a complete grammar course once in 4th-6th, once in 7th or 8th, and once again in high school.

7.    Have them write frequently.

8.    Use a variety of teaching resources to keep interest going. Provide them with different types and color of paper, make booklets (good resource is Valerie Bendt), and use some of these writing project ideas: http://www.oklahomahomeschool.com/writingideas.html

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