Make Writing Fun {TOS Crew Review}
Do your children balk at writing? Especially creative writing? You might want to check out Writers in Residence from Apologia Educational Ministries. It’s a great resource to make writing fun for your child. We recently got to review this through the TOS Crew and my oldest daughter is definitely loving it!
Within the student book there is a schedule having you use the writing curriculum four days a week. This worked out well for us. This is a physical product review. We received the Writers in Residence Volume 1 full set which includes a student all in one text and workbook as well as an answer key book. I love that the student book is spiral bound. It really is huge guys and that spiral binding helps!
The set we received is retailing for $89 currently. If you’re going to have more than one student using the curriculum you’ll need to purchase other student books separately. The student book alone retails for $80 while the answer key retails for $15.
Within the student book there are six modules that focus on different aspects of writing and also helping your child with spelling, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization in a way that will make it fun and not seem so much like drilling a grammar lesson into them. At the end of each module there is a mastery test to make sure that your child has learned all that was important in that section.
You may have noticed that this is Volume 1 that we received to review. Apologia does have plans in the future to produce and release a volume 2, but as of now I don’t have any more information about that to share.
This curriculum is geared towards 4th-8th graders. I was using this with my 11 year old daughter. Grammar wise she’s at a 4th grade level so it was a perfect fit. She also loves to write so that was a plus! This book is colorful within which helps to keep the eye focused and helps to keep attention from wandering.
As I mentioned above, there is a schedule within that has you using this four days a week. It is also written for a 32 week course which makes planning wonderfully easy. For me that is a great plus. I hate planning. I’m at the point where I have 9 kids and I can’t plan out and make detailed lesson plans anymore. I copy the schedule out of the book and put it in the scheduling planner for my daughter so she knows what we’re doing daily and so do I. Also great for keeping records!
Some fun things about the program. It has lots of fun writing prompts that tempt the imagination. It also works on helping your child with grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. It’s more than just teaching your child the fundamentals of how to write, it’s making writing fun and helping them to enjoy writing and creating while they learn.
The writing portion consists of six steps.
- Ideas
- Organization
- Sentence Structure
- Word Choice
- Voice
- Conventions
While teaching with these six concepts it’s also teaching your child to evaluate and improve their own writing. What I keep coming back to and what really makes me like this curriculum is that with it you can make writing fun. Also throughout the student book you’ll find interviews with famous Christian authors. It’s a great encouraging addition to the book as it shows what the writer may have struggled with, how they overcame it, and how they get ideas for their own works. in essence, it helps to make writing fun for the student and less of a task for you the parent to teach. Even I found these little sections interesting!
Want to hear more about this and how to make writing fun? Check out the Main TOS Blog for more reviews! We all reviewed the same curriculum but with different ages, learning styles, and attitudes! You can also find more about Apologia on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
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