From the Desk of WriteShop
April 30th, 2008 — Grammar
Jane Straus, author of The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation, is back as a guest at our blog with another helpful grammar nugget. Jane promises:
“You will impress your family and friends with your grammar skills if you can distinguish between lie and lay. However, these words confuse even the best editors, so you pretty much have to memorize a chart and then practice to build your confidence.” Continue reading →
April 29th, 2008 — Kim's blog, WriteShop Primary
You’ve heard of timed-release cold capsules, motion-sickness patches, and fertilizers. But timed-release curriculum?
In a sense, that’s what these past couple of months have been about—a slow-release introduction to our up-and-coming WriteShop Primary series for grades K-3. Today, let’s “release” just a bit more about this exciting new program! Continue reading →
April 28th, 2008 — Announcements, Conventions, Kim's blog
April 28th, 2008 — Articles, Kim's blog, WriteShop
As you pick up a grammar program, geography book, or other curriculum from the shelf of your local homeschool store, do you ever wonder how it got there?
Do you perhaps envision a talented team at work in some big-city corporate office building comparing research or collaborating over cover designs?
If so, let me QUICKLY dispell that myth for you! Continue reading →
April 25th, 2008 — Announcements, Conventions, Kim's blog
April 24th, 2008 — Announcements, Kim's blog
April 23rd, 2008 — Grammar, Kim's blog
The most common problem I’ve seen in my years of grading papers has to be the misuse of the apostrophe, and specifically, the mix-up between the words “its” and “it’s.”
In early WriteShop I lessons, as students describe objects, pets, and foods, their papers are often riddled with sentences that misuse “it’s”:
Cringe. Continue reading →
April 22nd, 2008 — Kim's blog, Reviews
I have 
always loved to supplement our history studies with historical fiction. I found picture books and novels aplenty when we were studying Greece and Rome, the Renaissance and Reformation, or the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. But ancient Sumer? The closest I could get was the story of Gilgamesh, but it’s an epic, not a novel, and not nearly so appealing to eight- to twelve-year-old girls!
Happily, both girls and boys alike will delight in Secret of the Scribe, the first historical novel about ancient Sumer I’ve seen. Author Jennifer Johnson Garrity transports the reader back 5000 years to the time of Abraham and the bustling city of Ur. Told in first person, it’s the story of a young girl, Tabni, who grows up in comfort as a slave to a Sumerian queen—until a great calamity forces her to flee the palace by night and make her way into the world alone. Continue reading →
April 21st, 2008 — Articles, Kim's blog, Poetry
In Spring into writing, part 1, we dipped our toes into some fresh descriptive writing and journaling ideas. Today, in honor of the season, let’s play around with a bit of whimsical poetry.
Who says poems have to rhyme? Using the letters in the word SPRING, create an acrostic poem about the season. A line can be a single word, a phrase or partial thought, or a complete sentence.
The first poem makes use of simple descriptive phrases. Notice the repeated letters and sounds? Continue reading →
April 18th, 2008 — Kim's blog, WriteShop
Here’s another popular question that shows up in our WriteShop mailbag with regularity!
As parents plan their students’ schedules, they often ask us to help them figure out how much time each day’s activities take. Our answer? The ever-popular: “It depends!” Continue reading →
