10 Tips for Home Schooling

Since two of my daughters home school, one with a child old enough to use The Writer’s Compass as a tool for teaching creative writing, I though it appropriate to create “10 Tips for Home Schooling.”

Although I teach creative writing at the undergraduate and graduate level, I believe that this book is useful to students at the high school and junior high level and some of my methods may be useful for you to use with your student or students. My grading system is based on points earned for doing assignments thoughtfully, rather than the quality of the creative writing. My goal is to encourage my students to discover their story as they write and to not self-edit until they get to that stage of the writing process.

Assignments are meant to give students tools that will help them to form ideas and develop those ideas so that they can write the story they want to tell. The Writer’s Compass offers many tools to help meet creative writing goals and to develop and expand the student’s writing skills. The book can be used as a comprehensive text or material pulled out for lessons in certain areas of writing..

The “10 Tips for Home Schooling” is available for download at http://issuu.com/smudgedinkpress/docs along with a basic structure diagram that can be filled out.