Laurie Wardle: 00:00:00.000
I love curriculum. I’m just one of these curriculum– I love to read it just because it’s there. But I what I really liked is that in this, if you don’t love curriculum, everything is done for you. It’s in here. And so, okay, so then I have all the tools that I need right here.

[music]

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:26.188
Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe. Welcome to the Demme Learning Show. I am so excited to welcome my beloved guest, Laurie Wardel, Laurie and I have worked together alongside each other for the last couple of years. And Laurie has very quietly become very proficient at our product called Write Shop. And so today, we’re going to hack Write Shop for you. Why would we do that? Someone asked me, “Gee, that implies that there’s something wrong. And there’s nothing wrong with the product. It’s an excellent product. But we live in a very fast paced environment where more content comes to us in a day than came to our grandparents in all of their lives. And so we have to figure out how to make this a doable experience. And so Laurie is going to share with you a bunch of tips, a bunch of tricks. I’m here to tell you that this all is going to be an extremely valuable opportunity for you to learn how to make the best experience possible out of the Write Shop curricula. Laurie, would you please be so kind as to introduce yourself?

Laurie Wardle: 00:01:35.412
Sure. Again, my name is Laurie Wardel and I was a homeschool mom for 11 years. I’ve been in education my whole life. My background is special ed. I absolutely love Write Shop in that. It speaks to all of our senses and we’re going to get into that later on on how that can be tweaked for the neurotypical and the non neurotypical student. So that’s a little bit. I have three children and four grandsons. I just have a brand new. He’s four months old. And so I’m living in that world. I had the opportunity to use a little bit of Write Shop when I homeschooled my grandsons during COVID. So I was able to actually kind of dive into that and found some real gems in this writing curriculum. I think you’re going to love it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:28.303
Awesome. Well, and although I work for Demme Learning and it’s a math company, my heart is in the creative writing world. So I was wildly excited when we acquired Write Shop. And that acquisition came a little over two years ago, and we have been very blessed by the curricula. And what we want to do is make this a doable enterprise for you. So when you look at these materials, you can see the best in them. So Laurie, where will we begin? What is the best first use of our time? What shall we talk about first?

Laurie Wardle: 00:03:03.871
So I think the general hack, what I would like to talk about first is to grab you guys to love this curriculum. And what I love about this is their pre-writing activities. The reason the author of this curriculum wrote this because her son was struggling in being able to write. And so there’s so many activities that you never even put pen to paper. And I’m going to give you an example of where I would start, but I need to just kind of back it up just to tell you the story. In one of the pre-writing activities, I don’t even remember what book I read this in. There is an activity where you sit back to back with your children. I play this game with my grandsons all the time where you have the same amount of resources. So I usually use Legos, same colors, that kind of stuff. And I built something. And then I have to explain to them how to build what I built, right, using all of my words, all of my direction.

Laurie Wardle: 00:04:11.048
And I’ve never put a pencil in my hand or written the first single thing. And then you go one, two, three, and you move out of the way and you see, does it match? So far, it never has. But that’s not the point. And then it’s their turn. They have to say put the red block in the middle, put the blue block on the right. They have to use all of these words in giving instructions and receiving instructions. So how does that help you in writing? Well, you’ve already verbally formed a pattern in your mind before you can do a descriptive paragraph, right? So it’s just really, really fun.

Laurie Wardle: 00:04:54.546
I encourage people to read those pre-writing activities and what all that means. That’s why I absolutely love this. So then the other thing I would do, the first thing when I picked up this curriculum, I would turn to something that looks like this. And what it is is it’s basically your lesson planning. And in this curriculum, they give you all kinds of options, a two-week lesson plan, a three-week lesson plans. We’ve had some people do just the one week. I I think that’s a little bit ambitious. So I wouldn’t do that. I always start with the two week. Then I skip. I’m going to show you all of this material right here in between.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:40.361
So you skip from page what to page what?

Laurie Wardle: 00:05:43.607
I skip from page 4 all the way to page 35 in book F. Okay, so that’s just an example.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:51.206
And you’re talking about book F right now.

Laurie Wardle: 00:05:53.906
Yes.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:54.663
Okay.

Laurie Wardle: 00:05:56.064
And I paper clip that. It’s not that this material is not important. It is. It defines what does sloppy copy mean? What does pre-writing mean? It gives you all those definitions, but it’s unnecessary at the beginning when you’re just trying to to jump in. And so one of the cool things is on the two-week lesson plan, it’ll say Monday activity set one. Well, lo and behold, when you get to page 35, it has activity set one and it coincides with your lesson plan. And so then you can just jump right in and go, okay, this, these are the pages that I’m going to do for activity set one.

Laurie Wardle: 00:06:37.214
And then Tuesday and Wednesday, you go over activity set two. So right after activity set one is the whole laid out plan of what you have to do for activity set two. And it does that. It’s numbered like one colon one, which means chapter one activity set one. Then the next chapter will be two colon one, which means chapter two activity set one.

Gretchen Roe: 00:07:06.034
So that that would be logical, but if someone doesn’t explain it to you, it would take me a while. I’m sort of a fly by the seat of my pants homeschooler, so it would take me a while to catch that up.

Laurie Wardle: 00:07:18.324
Exactly. And then I think what hinders some people is all that in between material because it’s really good stuff. It gives you all the materials you need for lesson one. It’ll list all that in between material, but I don’t need to see that quite yet. I just want to see how it works. So that would be my first hack.

Gretchen Roe: 00:07:42.143
Okay. All right. And then so so I’m a parent who’s just sitting down and getting ready to start the curricula. And your recommendation is rather than read through 35 pages of information to go into the first activity. And so is that information information just not necessary? I know the answer to this, but when am I going to access the information you’re having me paper clip together?

Laurie Wardle: 00:08:08.896
Say we are reading activity set one and you get to fold and go grammar. What is fold and go grammar? Well, guess what? It’s defined in that middle section. What does sloppy copy mean or pre-writing or these reading logs? So that middle section defines everything that you need to know. It’ll talk about brainstorming and what your writing project is and how do you edit and revise. That’s huge. What I really love and another thing I love about this curriculum is that it has a rubric that your student can’t argue with because writing can be subjective, “Do I like what they’re writing about?” “Not really.” And so, “Okay, I’m not going to get a really good mark.” That’s not what this is about. It’s a really consistent rubric that you go over with your student. And you agree that we’re going to follow this rubric. And then when they do their sloppy copy, they can grade it themselves and go, “Do I have this? Yep. Do I have that? No. I got to go back and do that. No, no.” So then by the time it gets to mom or dad, that rubric has been agreed upon. And so it’s the rubric that’s saying you’re that you’re missing something not mom and dad.

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:29.905
Which is wonderful. Anywhere we can take the dynamics of, “You’re so mean.” It does make a difference. So in that then, you had said, and we had just talked about this this morning, what are the three most important things for me as a parent beginning this to make sure I don’t miss?

Laurie Wardle: 00:09:55.289
Some of that’s I’ve already spoken of. I would always do those pre-writing activities. And so I’m just going to give you a little bit of my special ed coming out of me out. But I really think these principles they’re finding now with neurotypical students that, we’ve been doing it in special ed classes for decades, but now they’re incorporating these activities and strategies into neurotypical classes as well.

Laurie Wardle: 00:10:23.414
So any time you can engage all of your senses, then learning is going to go from your short term memory into a long term memory, and you’ll be able to reproduce that, right? So it’s really, really important that you engage even with a neurotypical. And sometimes when you’re homeschooling and you’re overwhelmed and you have a baby and they just had a blowout diaper and you’re trying to teach writing in the middle of that, you can kind of lose that. The the cool thing about this curriculum is that it’s hands on, and I love anything that is hands on. And because it’s hands on, you can stop. You have permission to be in control of your day and of your time. And there are times when you have to say, “Okay, let’s just take a little 15-minute break. Let’s stop.” But the cool thing about this is when you’re engaging, say in a prewriting activity and it’s a game, the kids don’t even know they’re learning. But you do because you’re the parent. You see what’s happening downstream. So you’ve done a prewriting skill. I would never skip that prewriting activity just because there is like a slight emergency with the kids or just put it off and do it when you have a moment. I just would not ever skip that. It’s very, very important for brain development and learning. Then the second thing is brainstorming for children of this age, especially the younger and even teenagers is really difficult, right? Because their experience is limited. They haven’t lived as much life as you have. And so you’re teaching them through brainstorming, organizing their thoughts. It’s really, really, really a good activity. They’re organizing their thoughts. They’re thinking beyond their experience, even like what do you–?

Laurie Wardle: 00:12:21.879
And you can do that by asking really intelligent questions to them. Well, what did you think when we visited the zoo and we saw–? Do you think that might be something that we could expand upon or write upon that experience? Even pre-writing, if you’re doing a narrative, like put it from the perspective of the monkeys that are looking at us and you can draw that out, right, if you’re asking really good questions during that brainstorming.

Gretchen Roe: 00:12:55.032
And some of those questions actually exist in the curricula.

Laurie Wardle: 00:12:58.650
Absolutely.

Gretchen Roe: 00:12:59.473
One of the things that I absolutely loved about this curricula is I was that parent who was very insistent on making sure that my children learn to write to an audience for a topic under a time constraint. But the challenge with that is we used some very prescriptive curricula. And my most vivid memory of this is one of my kids was required in his writing curricula to write about baseball. Now, there’s a lot of kids in our audience who would think that was just aces, but the sports section hit the trash unopened in the newspaper at my house because we just didn’t care. It wasn’t that we weren’t interested in sports, we just weren’t interested in conventional sports. So here is my child who’s asked to write about a baseball event and he was not only flummoxed, but it just shut him down mentally. And so can you talk a little bit about how we’re going to keep those learning pathways open by not prescribing?

Laurie Wardle: 00:14:00.886
Yeah, what is so good about this curriculum is that it’s written for the student. There are some prescriptive writing prompts if you just get stuck. So we don’t want you to think you have to come up with everything, but it’s built around interest so the children get to write– so when my children were going through it, this didn’t exist because I came off the ark. Just kidding, but it’s been a long, long while since my kids were doing this. So this wasn’t around and I wish it had been and being a special ed teacher, it was that I tweaked the curriculum to do very similar things. So this curriculum is not so prescriptive that you would be forced to write about a subject that you just absolutely have no interest in whatsoever.

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:57.321
And I think that makes a tremendous amount of difference. So do I have to do everything that is outlined in the lesson?

Laurie Wardle: 00:15:05.254
No, no, you do not. You absolutely do not. The reason why are the best practices are that pre-writing, the brainstorming and then the sloppy copy. So what you’re trying to do– I think sometimes we lose sight of the goal of why we’re teaching what we’re teaching. Why do we teach math? Why do we teach writing? Why? What’s the purpose behind it? And and it’s a lot easier to check the box off to say I did this thing. What is the purpose of teaching your child to write? I actually asked my grandson this. He’s 10. I said, “Well, we started talking about it and it’s to communicate.” He said, “I talk, I already communicate really well.” I just thought that was such a great answer. I already communicate really well. And I said, well, there’s a lot of different forms of communication and one of the ways we communicate is through writing. And so he’s really into– he’s a high functioning autistic and so he does not like anything fantasy that doesn’t have its roots in the real world. I said, so what if you were trying to learn about– he was really into crawdads for a while. He used to catch them in the creek and he wanted to learn all about crawdads. And so he went to the library and got these books. And I said, what if the communication in those books didn’t put that information in a way that you could understand it? And for him, that was enough to go, “Oh, I get why I need to write now. I get it, for other people to understand.” And that was good for him.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:49.879
That’s right. Well, that’s a brilliant response too, because you didn’t shut him down. You kept the conversation going. That probably is the single hardest thing that a raiding adverse parent has to learn to do.

Laurie Wardle: 00:17:05.431
Absolutely.

Gretchen Roe: 00:17:06.442
Is to keep the conversation going. Well, the other thing I think that we fail to take into account is writing, creative writing, whether it’s a descriptive paragraph, a fantasy paragraph, a factual paragraph, is the most difficult thing we ask our students to do. And sometimes as parents, we get the wrong end of the stick because not only do we want them to write, but we want them to spell everything correctly. And we want them to punctuate. And we want them to use creative words. And I use this conversation when I talk about creative writing at homeschool conferences. I have a 10-year-old who wants to write about an elephant, an elephant, an elephant– I’m going to write about a pig because I’m sure I can spell the word pig, but I’m not sure I can spell the word elephant. So we all of a sudden start truncating our creativity right out of the gate. And that becomes difficult.

Laurie Wardle: 00:18:03.217
So one of the things I love when you’re talking to Kim about these things, what if you have a student that can’t even hold a pencil correctly yet and they’re 10 or 12 years old.

Gretchen Roe: 00:18:17.289
Right. Now we should say as an aside, Kim is Kim Koutzer, who’s the original developer. And you referenced her in the very beginning saying that she wrote this curriculum because she had a child who was a reluctant writer. I also think it’s always important to tell the Paul Harvey moment there. Her son now has a PhD. So she did a pretty good job creating [crosstalk]–

Laurie Wardle: 00:18:38.439
She did. I love to listen to her talk because she gives you just these gems. She gave an example of– made us answer the question, what is writing? What is creating? She said if you had a secretary and a boss– and I think she actually used Saint Paul and what we know about Saint Paul is that he had an eye issue. And so sometimes you would read, oh, well, I’ve done this in my own handwriting. But for the most part, he had a scribe. Did he write the Book of Acts or did the or the Book of Romans or did the scribe write the book of Romans? I’m like, “Oh, that was challenging. Did the Secretary write the letter or did the boss write the letter?” Don’t limit your children just because they can’t hold a pencil or form their letters. You write it down for them. You be the scribe for them. You can talk about all these. You can use your words to create more words and to create beautiful pictures in their minds. And you write the story. We get that when we do this for two, three, four year olds. We don’t tend to follow that same expectation with 10, 11 and 12 year olds. And I think it is completely okay, especially for little the boys who– and I’m painting with a broad brush here. But developmentally, many young boys– I had my nine-year-old son who was so ADHD – it wasn’t even funny – at nine years old told me, “I can learn or I can sit, but I cannot do both of those things.” [laughter]

Gretchen Roe: 00:20:20.035
I love it. “I can learn or I can sit,” that is really– and you know what? I might be that person, too. [laughter]

Laurie Wardle: 00:20:29.934
I just thought that was so great. I can learn. So that made me go, “Oh, wait a minute. What can I do to to change up this curriculum?” And do you know– I got a massive sheet of white– they used to put it for showers and you can actually turn that into a whiteboard. It’s less expensive than writing– than on a big whiteboard. And he did all of his work writing, his math going up and down. And I would just take pictures of his writing, take pictures of the problems that he got right just so I could make a portfolio for him. And so I had an electronic portfolio for him for a really long time. And he’s 30 now, pretty successful in what he’s doing. And I can always– when I call him, he’ll say, “Hold on, wait a minute,” and I know what he’s doing. He’s going outside so he can pace up and down.

Gretchen Roe: 00:21:21.027
I’m sure that more than one of my children got garroted because I’m not the person who can sit and talk on the phone. And back in the day, when the phone was on the wall [laughter] on the cord, somebody would come around the corner and the cord would catch him in the neck [laughter]. But you have hit on a really important point. We’re willing to scribe for a two, three– two, three, four, five, six-year-old. And then, somewhere along the line, we take our adult expectations. And we pin that on our child and we say exactly, “You should be able to do this.” And that’s not really true. And I homeschooled before the age of cell phones. But my cell phone is one of my most valuable writing tools. I’m in the process of creating something right now. And every chapter’s draft starts with me opening an e-mail and hitting the talk button and–

Laurie Wardle: 00:22:13.832
[crosstalk].

Gretchen Roe: 00:22:15.328
–just talk. Now, it creates some fiercely funny moments. But if you’re a parent who doesn’t want to sit and literally write down what your child’s saying, use your cell phone and at least capture the first draft that way.

Laurie Wardle: 00:22:28.061
Right, which leads us to that sloppy copy. Does the sloppy copy require copy or is your brainstorming in your phone? So there’s just so many more options available to you now where you can dictate into a phone, you can– even with Grammarly, oh, my stars. You dictate into Grammarly and they put the punctuation in there [laughter] for you. It’s just absolutely wonderful. So there’s all kinds of tools that you can use that weren’t available back in the day. But again, that was a real quick example of a tweak of this curriculum that would meet the needs of somebody that’s maybe developmentally delayed, not a regular neurotypical kiddo, but developmentally delayed in that they–

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:26.457
Whether it’s holding a pen or being able to– your son would have benefited from, “Here. Go tell me a story,” so you can walk around and tell that story as opposed to having to sit to tell that story.

Laurie Wardle: 00:23:41.307
Exactly. I think if we leave here the one gem I would do the takeaway is you have permission. One of the things that I’m fond of telling people is know your student. Know their learning style. So I have a– my middle daughter is an auditory learner. And even now she’s in her 30s and still struggles to read and comprehend if she doesn’t hear it. She didn’t have an IEP because we homeschooled, right? So back in the ’90s they didn’t collaborate with you the way they do now. So she went to college just fearful of not– she’s a trauma nurse. And she was incredibly fearful of being able to pass these tests. So knowing how she learned empowered her. This was not original with me. She did this on her own. She created study buddies. And they were four kids that went all four years and then they would have other kids come in it and they read aloud to each other and turned every single question into an NCLEX test question. For four years they did that, and those four kids aced that exam. And that was so important because she understood the information. She knew that she needed the information to come into her world for her to change it up to where she could replicate it. And she did that on her own. So I think WriteShop allows you to be able to tweak and do that for each learning modality.

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:26.836
Laurie, can we talk a little bit before we get to these questions because I really have some good ones for you? But I’d like to explain a little bit about placement for WriteShop. And so placement, like our other curricula, is not grade level. It’s skills-based. But can you talk in a little bit more depth about placing a student and what a parent needs to think about in the placement process?

Laurie Wardle: 00:25:53.397
So there’s a couple of things in the placement that I would consider. First is obviously skill and what their reading levels would be because you don’t want to put a child who say is in the seventh grade into something that looks kind of like kindergarten, right, so. And we talk about that even in our math curriculum. That’s why we have AIM and that product line. So the first thing would be that. And the second thing I would talk about is scheduling of the mother because the mother is one person and it’s usually the mother who is responsible for all things homeschooling. This curriculum was created so that you could do one lesson, one book, say F over a pretty large age span so that you could do one book for children that are two or three years apart from one another, even in skill level.

Laurie Wardle: 00:26:50.345
And so I love that the author took that into consideration when she was writing it because thank you to– as a homeschool mommy, that’s really pretty important. So the way it’s set up, there is a a test that you can do online in our– writeshop.com is just a great website. There’s so many resources on that website, so many articles. You you just need to try to schedule some time to absorb all of it. But we have a section that says no prior writing experience. You might be in WriteShop Primary C or limited writing experience would be WriteShop C or D. Writing at grade level might just be book D and then writing above grade level would still just be book D. What I would say is don’t– and I think I’m mirroring what the author has said in one of her videos. Don’t ever go beneath their level.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:00.641
Because what you’re looking to do is place them at their intellectual capacity, not their output. And that is enormous to be able to– because for one thing, kids know when you’re teaching down to them, they catch on really quickly and they’re more likely to aspire to a slightly higher bar than they are to a lower bar.

Laurie Wardle: 00:28:24.996
Exactly. So if you have a student say that’s around 6th grade and they would be in book D or E and they’ve never had any writing experience. And then you have one who’s writing at grade level on F. I would put both of them in F. If their vocabulary and everything else was really good, I would do that as a homeschool mom.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:53.022
The other thing that’s important there is then you as the parent are only working with one set of curricula. You might be tailoring expectations to two different children, but you’re only working with one set of instructions and lessons, and the creative end of it, like the pre-writing assignments can be tailored to meet those two different students’ needs.

Laurie Wardle: 00:29:15.373
Right. So that’s a huge hack. It’s saved you money, which is always a plus, and it saves you time, which is even a bigger plus.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:25.334
So I want to turn my attention to the questions because– and I did something mean to you today. So I’m going to apologize in advance. My intention was because I have just come back from a homeschool conference. My intention was to get these questions to Laurie yesterday, but I did not. And this is going to show you how good Laurie is because I have no doubt that she’ll be able to answer any of these questions. And so we’ve actually addressed a couple of them. The first one that I want to talk about is teaching those editing skills to a proficient writer. And this is where the rubrics are so helpful. So can you revisit a little bit so a parent really understands how the rubrics help them help their child become more proficient?

Laurie Wardle: 00:30:17.106
So to become proficient at editing is practice. That’s just the huge word. Even now when my children send me, they always send me there– I have a daughter-in-law who’s a professor at a nursing college and she writes papers and still sends– I have no idea what she’s talking about, but she still sends me her papers to edit. So to have those skills, it’s just practice. So I would be aware of the expectations. I’m a huge goal set. I love goals. I love being able to reach the goal. But really the goal is do I edit better now than I did this time last year or this time two years ago? So setting reachable expectations to say, “Okay, am I catching this comma consistently? Am I starting my sentences with a capital letter consistently? Am I putting the appropriate ending punctuation consistently?” And then I tend to think less is more, especially when you’re first starting out, you’ve got a very proficient writer and their mechanics is the problem, then I pick four things that we’re going to work on that year and we’re going to really concentrate on those four things. And then we’ll add four more things the next year. I think what we tend to want to do, most homeschool moms want to say, “Boy, it would be a lot easier if I could just kind of slice their head and pour all that in there and we expect almost a perfection that’s just not going to happen. It just takes time and practice. So I think less is more in this situation when it comes to editing. And so if you start that real early on in their career, of the things I just mentioned, starting with the capital letter, ending with– and then okay, commas, we’re going to be all about commas this year because that’s the biggest thing. So we’re going to talk about commas, and we’re going to concentrate on commas in this year in your edited. Let’s look at all these commas. But to do all of mechanics in one year and have that expectation, I think that’s a little, I mean–

Gretchen Roe: 00:32:51.866
I think it’s a lot. But if you have a proficient writer– here’s one of the things that I think goes hand in hand with that is, no one is proficient at really editing their own work. So this is where mom has to be willing to come along and collaborate. And this is why I love the rubric. You put the rubric up in front of you. The two of you sit down together and mom asks the questions, “Okay. This rubric says, ‘Did you start every sentence with a capital and finish with the appropriate punctuation?'” And then have your student look through and go, “Oh, I didn’t do that here.” That’s a learning experience. The other thing that’s important is you can’t write and edit in the same day. We get a lot of moms who are like, “Well, we didn’t start right chop on Monday like my plan was. So we’ve piled it up into the end of the week, but [crosstalk] unless you do the whole megillah today.” And that’s not a recipe for success, is it?

Laurie Wardle: 00:33:51.301
No, I will tell you a funny story. So I wrote a book about my family legacy as I was doing genealogy. I wrote the book, hired an editor, and then I had 10 of my friends read this book. And do you know I was reading that thing the other day and still found a mistake, and I was like, “Are you kidding me?” Because it becomes part of the landscape. You know what you wanted to say, and so your brain reads what. And so I would even venture, have an aunt read your, have somebody that’s not read it before. Have dad come home and go and read it and and see if he sees anything. “Oops, I found two common errors. Can you find those? Do you think you can find those in there?” Because now they’re looking for them.

Gretchen Roe: 00:34:40.504
Right. Right. So another question is multiple ages all at once, no schedule difference. We’ve already talked about this, but the thing that I want to allow you to offer encouragement here is to recognize that you can meld and tailor a single level to multiple ages, right?

Laurie Wardle: 00:35:01.937
So especially like the prewriting game that I talked about at the beginning, you can have them play that together, even the older kids, just play it together and have fun.

Laurie Wardle: 00:35:16.316
Some, and this is just more than just writing. Often in homeschooling, mommies I see– we’re not going to be a school at our home. And yet we tailor our homes to look like a classroom. A good case in point when I was telling you my son said. “I can sit, or I can learn, or I can be still.” Well, he needed to move so much that even in his math when he was doing his drills, I bought a pogo stick and down in the basement he went and he did his drills jumping up and down on a pogo stick. That is just permission to be as creative as you need to be in this arena. you’ve got three kids doing the same thing. One is 6. One is 8, And one is 10, and they’re doing the same curriculum. Well, your 6-year-old may really still be struggling to even hold a pencil, but your 10-year-old writes really, really, really well. Let your 6-year-old dictate to the 10-year-old.

Gretchen Roe: 00:36:24.033
[crosstalk] practice right there on the spot.

Laurie Wardle: 00:36:26.081
And having to remember all the punctuation rules while somebody’s talking. So all kinds of of cool things that you can do to tweak this information into their little brains in the way that they can absorb it. You have permission to do that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:36:43.757
A mom has asked a question saying that my child is struggling with the creativity end of the experience. And I’m going to offer a hack of my own that I heard this weekend. See this notebook here. For those of you who are listening to the audio, what I’m holding is a notebook that can store pencils, and it clips shut. And it’s like a clipboard, but it has a space inside it that’s an inch thick to put things into. And what this right shop mama had explained, she has three children, very different ages. Each one of them has a notebook. And on top of it is a thin one inch rolled notebook itself. So that’s clipped on the clipboard on top. But inside, she has some markers and some pencils and all sorts of things. And she said those three notebooks, clipboards sit by the back door.

Gretchen Roe: 00:37:45.832
And when they have to go somewhere, each one of her children has to take that with them. And they are required to observe their environment when they’re out. They can draw a picture. They can make notes. They can come up with a variety of ideas, but every one of them is required to engage while they’re out in their environment with things that they think might be appropriate things to tell stories about later. And I thought this was a brilliant idea because it’s a very low bar. I think this thing cost me about 7 or 8 dollars at Staples. And to be able to have that, know it’s ready to go, and then when she sits down, and her kids are like, “Well, I can’t think of anything to write about.” go get your traveler’s notebook, which is what she called them, and let’s have a conversation about the things you’ve seen. And I think that’s just a perfect idea.

Laurie Wardle: 00:38:45.478
And then the second thing Gretchen and I would do is define creative, right? So you’re going to have a kiddo like my grandson who by the definition of creative is not going to tell you this real flowery story. He’s judged. So I would really define what that means to– in fact, we play this game and have since they were little. As I put them to bed at night when they’re spending the night is I will start a story, and then the next one has to have a sentence, and then the next one creates a sentence. And the middle one is the most fantastic creative. The elephants were polka dot and flying and the whole nine yards. And then it’ll get to the 10-year-old, and he’s like, “Elephants aren’t pink polka dotted, and they don’t fly.” And he will put an end to that in a heartbeat. But we’ve just learned this is the way he thinks. And so all of a sudden, it comes back down to the reality of what an elephant actually is. And then, we just keep going with the story. And so it will just take go into all of these other little little tributaries. So I would define creative. I love what she’s done is she’s been creative in and brainstorming. So giving them tools to brainstorm of what they can write about because it’s the reality of their experience, but be careful in defining, I would say, in creativity. So if you’ve got one that’s not neurotypical and just– I mean on every single test, that’s one of the reasons he was diagnosed with autism because he just cannot go there in his brain. He’s so literal.

Gretchen Roe: 00:40:30.106
He’s just too literal. And now I will say this mom who gave me this idea, she had a very literal child and she said that she had to very carefully school her face because one of his writing experiences while they were out was he counted the number of pieces of trash he saw while they were out on a walk, which is kind of funny. But you know what? That child might grow up to be an environmentalist. You just [crosstalk].

Laurie Wardle: 00:40:58.515
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. But so she didn’t limit that because of his how literally [crosstalk] and didn’t define creative as being fantasy rather than [crosstalk].

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:13.450
Correct. Correct. Creative creation is in the eye of the beholder.

Laurie Wardle: 00:41:19.270
Exactly.

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:20.121
You don’t want to shut a child down. We just want to give them different tools. Here’s another question that I think is really important. And I know we have differing opinions here, so we can share some good questions, which is how would you use this program with a dyslexic student?

Laurie Wardle: 00:41:37.334
Oh, that’s very good. Well, we’ve talked about some of it. I would do a lot of dictation because, again, here’s a little bit of brain. You know that your learning center, which for some of us is right here at the base of your neck. And so what happen– gets frustrated with the very act of writing because they’re dyslexic or they struggle with writing. Why make them do that in this day and age where we can dictate? Because, again, what is the goal of writing? It is to communicate, right? And so we have so many helps today. We can type and, ohh, that word is spelled wrong. Got it. So I would probably in this case do a lot of dictation for– and it depends again on the age of the child and how much that child is going to have to write. And then what kinds of writing. But my first strategy in special ed would have been to have that child dictate a lot of their– and then when they type that out, run it through a program that catches spelling errors and, “Oh, I mixed those letters again. Oops.” And then they can fix it and still feel really good about what they’ve done and what they’ve created.

Gretchen Roe: 00:42:58.556
So, Laurie, I have another question here and I think this kind of speaks to the dyslexic student, the neurotypical student, or a student who’s kind of neurodiverse, which is I have a parent who’s struggling with the structures of the lessons because they’re too long. And so how would you tell a parent without just saying, “We’ll cut some stuff out”? What can that parent do in a preparatory experience to make the lessons more valuable?

Laurie Wardle: 00:43:30.402
For prepping for length, let’s just say it’s the sloppy copy day when they’re writing. I limit time. So if you need 30 minutes, 40 minutes, I start going, “I wouldn’t do longer than that,” especially for younger students at all. But I’m on a time crunch. Couple of things that that I would do, shorter sessions, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. So I might have a writing session in the morning. That’s 15 minutes long. And then we’ll finish it in the afternoon. That’s 15 minutes long. I’ve gotten in my 30 minutes, we were able to finish the work and my brain stayed engaged depending on my age. And then the other thing is I would do 15, 20 minutes a day. And then instead of two weeks, I know that this lesson is going to take me three, maybe even four because the length of the lesson is more than my child can absorb. Because remember, we’re not trying to put in the time and say, “Oh, we did this hour.” We’re trying to teach writing. And so am I writing better? I’m old, guys, and I’m taking Spanish. I’ve been doing it for two and a half, three years now. Can I speak more Spanish than I did when I first started? Absolutely. Am I fluent? Not yet, but I’m getting there. I’m making progress. And I think our time constraints that we put on ourselves are, “Oh, no, by the time they get to high school, they need to be doing.” But we’ve got to remember that our child’s brain is developing this whole time. They’re going to go through puberty, and it’s going to take a humongous leap. And our goal is to set really good foundations during these younger years. So it’s best that they have really good habits, right, of knowing how my brain works, knowing that I need this and good foundation of writing that by the time– I’ll tell you a real funny story that my son– again, he’s going to be mortified. I’m using him so much as examples. But in his freshman year in college, and he hates school beyond anything because it was too much sitting for him. Just couldn’t stand it. But you know all of his buddies were coming to him saying, “How do you know how to write these paragraphs? I’ve never even heard of this.” And he had a whole teaching session in his dorm about beginning, middle, and end. And you need to– and I was so proud of him because school was very difficult. And so he got the lesson that he needed to learn over time.

Gretchen Roe: 00:46:21.009
Sometimes we forget that the curriculum police are not going to stop by and knock on the door because we took four weeks to do a lesson instead of three weeks or two weeks. And so actually we had a parent ask this question, does the curriculum deal with the correct formation of paragraphs? And it does. But that also evolves over time. What would be defined as a paragraph from elementary school student would be different than what is defined for either a middle schooler or a high schooler.

Laurie Wardle: 00:46:54.776
So let’s take it even before a paragraph. Let’s just do a sentence. Really a sentence is a subject and a verb, right? So I can say she ran for our little guys. Is that not a paragraph for a little bit, little guy? Well, for them, yeah, it is. And we formed a really good sentence. We have a capital letter, and we have a period, and we have a subject, and we have a verb. And then we start adding those adjectives and it makes that dog. All of a sudden, he’s white and somebody put a red streak down it. It just gets bigger and bigger. But it starts with a good sentence, right? So our expectation as parents and as teachers need to mirror that and really have a goal in mind that, “Okay. This is the age of–” One of the things I really encourage people to do is go online and look at what your child– we’re real big on doing that when our kids are babies. We’ll look and say developmentally they should be rolling by about four or five months. And then we forget, completely forget that when they’re six, seven and eight years old and expect a six, seven and eight-year-old to sit for an hour and write. No, we can’t do that. We can’t do that. So it’s just managing again expectations of what a child can do at the correct time.

Gretchen Roe: 00:48:19.518
Right, and I think that that makes such a tremendous difference when we as parents think– the most important thing is to read the room. Are kids engaged? Are they having fun? Are they having a good time? Maybe if you have three different ages, you start with that sentence, “She ran” and then you move it around to the next kid, and “How did she run, and who was she?” And here you’ve got one sentence that can become a whole collaborative effort. And I think that’s one of the things that I have loved so thoroughly about the WrightShop curriculum, which is on the bookshelf behind me, is the fact that there is so many elements of creativity. And if anything, we’ve offered you a wild assortment of creativity. Now you get to pick and choose how you’re going to apply it.

Laurie Wardle: 00:49:14.800
Curriculum was written in such a way that it can bring value to your home and to my home and completely different students. Non-neurotypical, neurotypical, neurodiverse, wherever you happen to find yourself on this spectrum of learning. But it does take effort, and I think one of the things early on in my homeschooling career– I love curriculum. I’m just one of this curriculum, I love to read it just because it’s there. But what I really liked is that in this, if you don’t love curriculum, everything is done for you. It’s in here. Okay, so then I have all the tools that I need right here. I would say on the onset, there’s some really cool things. In the WrightShop junior, they have this thing called a time-saver pack.

Gretchen Roe: 00:50:17.900
Oh good. I wanted to make sure that we talked a little bit about that. It’s in my notes.

Laurie Wardle: 00:50:20.869
I would get that time– I would get that time-saver pack because basically what it does is all our card stock- and you just have– you don’t have to make copies. It’s already made for you and the things that you need, you just can cut out. So anything that’s going to help the mommy do less things I think is really, really important. Or the dad, whoever– or the grandmother, whoever’s teaching you at this point. So that’s huge, the time saver is. This does take a bit of prep and I encourage people to prep it at the beginning so that on those crazy days it’s already done. So like your fold-and-go grammars, which is not a complete grammar, but it does highlight those big areas that you need to focus on. For instance, the capital letter at the beginning and the ending punctuation, especially in those younger years, that you create those little folders at the beginning of the year and it’s already there. So it does take a little bit of prep and time. I don’t know a curriculum that doesn’t. You have to do a little bit of prep, but it’s so incredibly tweakable. I just can’t say enough good stuff about it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:51:36.921
Well, Laurie, I can’t believe we were almost to the top of the hour. So what would be the closing thoughts that you would have for our parents today?

Laurie Wardle: 00:51:44.548
I think the cool thing about WrightShop is that we have some wonderful CSRs and we offer– if you’re really struggling, just call 1-800. It’s 1-888-854-6284 number and you can talk to me. You can talk to anyone that will encourage you. If you just are running out of ideas, I would encourage you to go to Writeshop.com. There are unbelievable amount of ideas and articles and so well written, better said than I could have ever say it.

Laurie Wardle: 00:52:20.807
I would encourage you to go to that website and just absorb the videos and the articles. And then if you just have any questions, just reach out, get on the Facebook page. There’s all kinds of– back in the day we didn’t have this thing called Google. There’s all kinds of resources out there, specifically the WriteShop, that can help you. If you are stuck, spending too much time, and you just need some encouragement, just reach out. We’re here to help you.

Gretchen Roe: 00:52:57.158
I think the thing that’s also important for a parent to have as a takeaway is this curriculum is an absolutely marvelous tool that gives you the ability to adapt it to your homeschool environment. So don’t be a slave to the materials. Rather, adapt the materials to meet the goals that you determined for your children because that is enormous.

Laurie Wardle: 00:53:21.204
It’s huge. And I will say there has not been a curriculum that I have used that I have not tweaked in some way, form or fashion, because I knew my students. And I have three children, and I have one child that could learn under a rock. And she likes to read. She was reading by the time she was two. I have the auditory learner and then I have the ADHD. All incredibly different learners. And so the goal in being able to or the idea of being able to tweak a curriculum is to know your student. Really, be a student of your student. Learn how they learn and that will be the basis of how you tweak any curriculum that you use.

Gretchen Roe: 00:54:09.116
And those of you who have joined us for any length of time know that is the mantra of our soul here. We want you to know your student better than anyone else because you know how your student learns best, and you can make those adaptations that are necessary to have the best academic experience possible. Let’s face it, folks, you’re homeschooling because you don’t want what the public school provides to you. So make it be to your benefit. Make it your own. Choose what you need to choose. And if you need some help in that choosing, folks like Lori are here to help you make it happen. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us today. It’s been my very great pleasure to host my friend Laurie as we have this conversation.

Gretchen Roe: 00:54:54.630
This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at Demmilearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it. And we’ll look forward to you joining us again in the future when we talk about another wonderful topic on your homeschooling journey. Take care, everyone.

Laurie Wardle: 00:55:18.042
Bye.

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