Homeschool Composition

Homeschool Review Crew

Composition.  Writing.  Essays.  These are all words that my children don’t seem to like.  Combine them to get homeschool composition time and they might just run the other direction as fast as they can.  I decided it’s simply because we haven’t done enough of it and they need practice.  Enter our new review from Writing with Sharon Watson.  Jump In, 2nd Edition is a great homeschool composition course for your middle school student.

We received physical copies of one student book and the teacher guide.  I decided to have my oldest daughter use this for the review period.  She is fourteen and going into her freshman year of high school for the 2019-2020 school year. 

This curriculum is available in print or digital copy.  We received the print version as I was only planning on trying it with one student and I love having the teacher’s book in print for the first time use.  However, after using this I could see getting this as a download.  Simply print off the teacher’s guide to have a master copy and then you can copy the pages to grade each assignment as needed.  It does make sense.  So, my personal recommendation after having used this is to go with digital if at all possible.

About the Program

This homeschool composition program is geared to the middle school grades, or grades 5-8 roughly.  Something I love about the program is the variety of ways you can use it.  You can use it as a one-year curriculum or a three-year curriculum depending on how quickly your child gets the materials or how fast you want to push them.  

If you’re using with a younger middle schooler then stretching it out over three years is a great way to be helping them work on composition over a larger period of time.  You’ll see improvement but they won’t get overwhelmed.  If you find this later on in schooling and start it with an eighth grader you can easily finish it up in one year and get their essay skills polished before jumping into high school.

The lessons are small and easy to do.  Nothing overwhelmed.  All bite-sized and not taking too much at once.  

Your child is going to learn 98 different writing skills throughout this course of work.  It will bring them from simply writing a paragraph to writing wonderful essays.  

Somethings that will be learned are:

• the four modes of writing and how to write in them all
• expository essays
• writing a report
• how to write a how-to paper
• writing a persuasive essay
• brainstorm and organize points
• write a book report
• compare and contrast
• write a newspaper article
• and so much more!

Differences from Edition 1

The first and second editions of Jump In differ in that the 2nd edition has more help for the student for paragraph writing.  It has more about proofreading and writing a personal narrative as well.  And the best part is the specific checklist for each assignment so the student can proofread their own work before handing it in. 

Teacher’s Guide

The teacher’s guide offers a grading rubric for each and every assignment to make grading less of a chore for you.  You still get to interpret but there are specific things that each type of writing should have and this gives you a cheat sheet of sorts to make grading easier.  This mama of many loves all the help she can get.  

I also like having this teacher’s guide so that if I needed to have someone else grade some assignments they don’t have to worry about remembering all of this from when they were in school lightyears ago.  

Our Thoughts

We decided to use this as a one year course.  This isn’t entirely true though as I’ve been having my daughter do extra work to make it take even less than a year.  She’s going into 9th grade this fall.  Actually, it’s more like next month as we start our school year in July. So I knew that I wouldn’t want her to be still working exclusively on this while doing her freshman course work too.  So we decided to do it over the summer as a fast-paced double or nothing type of work.  She may not do every single lesson but it really is helping her writing skills.

Writing and composition is an area of homeschool that I know I have slacked off in.  My children are not strong writers which should be shocking considering how much I like to write.  And of course, the fact that I do these reviews and write all of these blog posts! How horrible of me!

Anyway.  I love writing but fighting the battles to get my children to love writing as well just hasn’t been a priority.  I realize now that it does need to be before they hit high school and going off to college.  That’s where this review comes in!  I see this being my stepping stone to getting them from doing as little work as possible to complete the assignment to actually really and truly doing an amazing job!

I would go with the digital over print with this specific curriculum now that I’ve used it.  That also makes it much simpler if you’re wanting to use it with more than one student as well. 

This is a self-paced curriculum and mostly self-taught.  As the parent and teacher there really isn’t a whole lot that has to be done which I love.  Definitely makes it less of a chore for you.  I did find it to explain things well. My daughter didn’t have a lot of questions for me as she was writing.  She hasn’t had a lot of writing practice and definitely has shown improvement with what we’ve gotten done so far.

Once we start our actual school year I see us continuing to use this but at a much slower rate.  I still see us finishing within a year of starting the program but going slower than we are in this between grades time of schooling.  

Learn More

You can learn more about what other homeschool families on the Homeschool Review Crew thought of this homeschool composition course by simply reading all the reviews linked up on the main blog post.  Learn even more by checking out Writing with Sharon Watson on social media through Facebook and Pinterest.