A Homeschool Writing Curriculum I Love Doing with my Elementary Kids -

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Disclosure: I received the following homeschool writing curriculum for free and was compensated for my time. All opinions are honest, and I was not required to post a positive review. This posts contains affiliate links.

You know what subject I find hardest to teach in my homeschool? Writing! I have struggled with finding a great homeschool writing curriculum for years. However, now I’ve found something that works for us. It’s Apologia‘s Writers in Residence™ All -In-One Student Text and Workbook and Answer Key.

How this homeschool writing curriculum works

The Apologia Writers in Residence™ All -In-One Student Text and Workbook is called “all-in-one” because it’s a big book that includes the teaching material and all the worksheets that kids need to fill out. We actually started it at the end of school last spring and then picked it up again for the last two weeks, so we have completed 60 pages, the first 3 modules. There are 24 modules and 572 pages in total.

We started out with a project where the kids learned that sometimes authors/writers draw from their own childhood memories when they are writing. The three students I had who worked on it are ages 8, 10, and 12. The curriculum says it’s written for grades 4-8, and I found that all three of these students did well with it. My 12-year-old daughter has dyslexia, so I helped her by letting her dictate some of the sentences and writing it down for her.

Concepts learned

Some of the concepts learned in these first 3 modules were:

Nouns: common versus proper and general versus specific
Verbs: how to use vigorous verbs rather than a boring or non-vivid verb
How to use a rubric to guide what you’re writing as well as evaluate how you did at the end
Two ways to organize your writing: chronologically and topically
Pre-writing, revising, and writing a final draft
How to care about your readers

Ways this homeschool writing curriculum is fun

Both my kids and I love how this homeschool writing curriculum is laid out. It’s beautiful and varied. I think they enjoyed the worksheets–at least as much as they can since none of these three kids particularly loves writing as a subject.

One fun activity they did was to take their draft sentences about their childhood memories and write each sentence on a strip of paper (included, of course!).

Then, they rearranged them to see if they could find a way for it to be better organized.

Why I think you’ll like this homeschool writing curriculum

Apologia’s Writers in Residence™ All -In-One Student Text and Workbook and Answer Key has several features that make it absolutely wonderful for the homeschool mom.

I love how everything is all included in the one book. I didn’t have to make any copies or search for the separate teacher’s guide. (The negative with this is that the book is pretty big and heavy.)

Second, there is an answer key included, but I only had to use it once, when we got to the review questions at the end of module 3. In other words, it’s handy but isn’t something you’ll need every day.

Third, this curriculum is very versatile. In the beginning, there is a sample schedule you can follow if you want some guidance for how much to do each day. I simply did it by how much time it took us. We spent about 15-30 minutes on it each day that we did it. I have another curriculum that I love for teaching my kids grammar and some writing/language arts concepts, so I’m going to go back and forth between these two curricula. Use the other one for a month or so and then use this one for a month or so. I do love the specific writing activities that they are doing in Writers in Residence.