Kim Kautzer: 00:00:00.442
If you can identify and help them fix a handful of errors, or you can help them choose or point to how to choose stronger words if they’ve used weak words, how to expand a short sentence to make it longer, those things are going to improve your kid’s writing without you having to have a lot of skill and know-how. [music]

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:28.525
Welcome to the Demme Learning Show. Our mission here is to help families stay in the learning journey wherever it takes them. This bonus episode was previously recorded as a webinar and was not created with the audio listener in mind. We hope you will find value in today’s episode. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Gretchen Roe, and it’s my very great pleasure to welcome Kim Kautzer this afternoon, the author, founder, and developer of WriteShop. And I will tell you, I just am coming back late last night from the St. Louis Homeschool Convention, and boy, were parents excited about this program. I have so many questions and so many things I want to ask Kim about, but I also want you to have insight into how this amazing program was developed. I laughingly say I’d much rather teach creative writing than mathematics, and I know that that gets a lot of parents who look at me like I am crazy. But I love the creativity that comes with watching a child find their writer’s voice, and to me, there’s just nothing more exciting than that. And so today, we’re going to have the opportunity to spend some time with Kim and learn about the evolution of WriteShop and then how you can fit yourself in the frame for this fantastic program. So Kim, let’s get started. And by way of introduction, if you could be so kind as to tell us the story of how you came to be the author of WriteShop.

Kim Kautzer: 00:02:05.962
Well, I’ll start by saying this was never in my plan, to publish a curriculum. I was just a normal homeschool mom, just tilling around through my life, teaching my kids, teaching–

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:19.491
Well, you know what happens when you say never. God writes your name in this book. [laughter]

Kim Kautzer: 00:02:25.059
Pretty true. Pretty true. Well, it wasn’t even that I said I would never do it. It just never even crossed my mind. I would never have thought I had anything worth publishing. It’s like I was happy using what I could find and I didn’t have any need, but that was the catalyst. So my friend Debbie and I were teaching co-op classes to a small group of kids through our homeschool umbrella. And we were teaching most– I mean, everything we did was hands-on and creative and fun. Whether we were teaching California history, we would visit the ranchos and visit– we had a friend who was a mountain man reenactor, and we met him in the mountains and surprised our class. And they got to make beef jerky and shoot bows and arrows. It was like that kind of stuff. We just loved it. We did history and cultures and missions, and so that brought in opportunities to learn geography and map work and cooking and crafts. Well, fast forward about four years down the road where we were getting ready to do another class and trying to decide what do we want to do for this next year. And Debbie said, “We should teach a writing class because our boys are still really struggling with that.” And it’s like I’m thinking, well, if I had been successful up to this point, it’s like he would already have it. So I don’t know what I could do that would be different enough to make him get it now. And so we went back and forth and she says, “Okay, I’ve got this really great video.” And it was something that I never heard of before. I’ve never seen anywhere since. But it just basically taught a five-sentence paragraph. And it looked really innocuous enough and simple and thought, “Okay, we’ll give it a try.” We had 14 kids in our class and we were committed for a year to teach these kids and we were getting paid. So it was like, okay, we’re in this. We weren’t nervous because we’ve been doing this for years. But this first day of class, we put this video on, first lesson, collect all the papers from the kids at the end and were flabbergasted at how horrible everyone’s writing was. I mean, some kids, many of the students were worse than our sons and our sons were so bad. Our girls were intuitive writers. They didn’t have trouble. They didn’t struggle. My daughters were just kind of like me. They loved to write. They didn’t feel afraid of it. And Ben was just– he struggled. And we had come to realize that he had some learning challenges. But nonetheless, we had to do something with these kids because we had a commitment. So we stopped class for two weeks and we met every single day and hammered out a plan. How do we want to get kids from point A to point B all the way down the line? And this was middle school. So we didn’t have little ones. We only had a couple of ninth graders. It was mostly sixth through ninth.

Kim Kautzer: 00:06:01.938
And we just started writing less than a week. And we were up till midnight on Sunday night. I had a key to the coffee shop in our town where I got myself in and use the machine with my automatic key fob thing. Anyway, long story short, we started seeing great strides in these kids. And over time, we decided to teach it again and then again and our waiting list grew and parents were freaked out because their kids were going to age out of our class before they made it down to the bottom of the waiting list or the top, I guess it would be. So they said, “Hey, would you make the teacher’s manual and publish your stuff?” It’s like, no. But we did give our student materials to our educational consultant better umbrella school. She spoke at homeschool conventions. She was very strong in teaching writing. And we thought if Bethany gives us a thumbs up, then we’ll proceed. And she came back several months later. She says, “I think you’ve got a winner.” And that’s how Write Shop 1 and 2 were born. And then the younger levels just came after when we realized we didn’t want to write for younger kids, but there was a need. And so we commissioned Nancy Sanders at the time to start writing.

Gretchen Roe: 00:07:39.746
I guess just a little over a year ago, you started conversations with us, and now Write Shop is part of the Demme Learning family as of the 1st of January. And we’re so excited to have this program that fits the Demme philosophy of being a lifelong learner and being able to be flexible in the learning process with your students and it has just been absolutely amazing. And having come off of two conferences back-to-back, two weekends in a row, talking to new families about WriteShop, it’s been really exciting. So very wonderful to see. So what would you say would be the number one thing that parents need to know about teaching their children writing?

Kim Kautzer: 00:08:26.114
The number one thing they need to know? It’s a process. I mean, really, it boils down to writing is not a one-time event. As much as our kids would like to sit down– no, they don’t want to– strike that. They don’t want to sit down and write anything. But as much as they would like to get it over with really quickly and just scribble something out on a paper and call it good, and have you be excited about it, and have you rave and not criticize, the truth is writing is a process. It’s not a one-time event. It takes time. It takes practice. And it’s not unlike any other skill– excuse me, any other skill that your kids would learn, whether it’s video gaming or soccer or baking or some kind of sewing or craft or scrapbooking. I mean, whatever your kids are interested in and they love to do and they’ve gotten good at it, they didn’t get there– and so I think that’s probably the main thing I would want to tell parents.

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:42.883
So parents often say that they are so anxious about teaching writing. When you teach math, the answer is right or it’s wrong. And writing has this large subjective component, and that’s where parents’ anxiety arises. So how would you recommend a parent step around that and come alongside their student?

Kim Kautzer: 00:10:11.357
Oh, that is a fantastic question. And one of the biggest– we probably get three main questions or fears or concerns. It’s universal. Parents either feel like they can’t teach writing because they never learned to write, or they can’t teach writing because they’re a good writer or an intuitive writer, but they don’t know how to communicate what they know to their kids, or they don’t know how to edit and grade writing in a subjective way or what to expect at each age. So what I would say as far as the last one, just because that was the question you raised, is first be present with your kids. Don’t just throw an assignment at them and go away because if they are not doing it right to begin with, then there’s going to be a whole lot more backpedaling. Make sure you’re taking them through that process, which means they’re brainstorming and maybe doing some other prewriting activities like games or teaching, things that will teach them writing skills. Let them have a chance to write a rough draft. Their first draft will not be their finished piece and then help them through the editing process and realize that you don’t have to know it all. If you can identify and help them fix a handful of errors, or you can help them choose– or point to how to choose stronger words if they’ve used weak words, how to expand a short sentence to make it longer. Those things are going to improve your kids’ writing without without you having to have a lot of skill and know-how. But the other thing is it’s important to have a good curriculum as your foundation because if you’re just making it up as you go and you’re not a strong writer and you don’t know what you’re doing and you feel intimidated and overwhelmed, you are going to find– it’s like for me, I could never teach math or science without some kind of a textbook or curriculum. And even then, it was really helpful for me to be able to have friends I could lean into to say, “Hey, we’re stuck,” especially when I got into higher math. And I had no shame in getting a tutor for my daughter in calculus because I never took calculus. [laughter] So the other thing too about editing and grading is if you’ve got that curriculum that you’re using, like with WriteShop, every level has editing tips and helps for parents as well as for the student. And as you move through the levels, you’re learning to ask questions of your younger kids without using the formal checklist. “Hey, do we have a capital letter at the beginning of each of our sentences? Do all of our sentences end with a period or other punctuation mark? Do we have a beginning and middle and end in our story?” So you start small with your kids as they start small.

Kim Kautzer: 00:13:27.671
And then when you get into the upper elementary grades and there’s a checklist that’s been introduced, it’s written for the student. Again, it asks about their punctuation, their beginning, middle, and end. Did they include details? Did they use a thesaurus? But all those kinds of things to help your child write a stronger paper and then during the editing process, you’re just kind of going through those things to help them make sure they’ve used them all or checked the boxes correctly. And then by the time you get to high school, middle school and high school, it can be a whole lot scarier. The checklist is longer. It’s more detailed. It’s like, “I don’t know this stuff.” But you may not know what an appositive is, but if you’ve just given your kid the workbook and you haven’t worked with them during their skill building and you haven’t edited and corrected their skill builder using the answer key that’s in the book for you, then you won’t know what an appositive is when it comes time to edit their papers. So working with your kids, making sure you’re familiar with the lesson, you’re going to be learning along with them so you understand the expectations, it’s honestly not as scary as it sounds and feels. And again, you don’t have to fix every mistake. Just pick a few things, especially with reluctant writers, and let it just build over time.

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:58.294
One of the things that I said to parents this weekend is always keep all of your students’ compositional work because it’s so encouraging for them to see their skills grow along the way.

Kim Kautzer: 00:15:12.729
Yes, for sure.

Gretchen Roe: 00:15:13.545
And if you don’t have those early compositions, they’re not going to be able to see how their writing has changed. So I think that makes a tremendous difference. We heard this question in various forms all weekend and last weekend too. How do I teach writing if I don’t think I write well? So I wanted to hear your philosophy because I know that you have encouraged parents for more than 20 years to just enter in. And one of the things I love about WriteShop is it doesn’t leave you feeling like you have set yourself adrift in the deep end of the pool.

Kim Kautzer: 00:15:51.810
That’s a great point. It kind of ties in with what I talked about with the editing. If you have the tools your own tool belt, you’re going to be a lot more confident about teaching kids because you don’t have to pluck things out of a hat and make wild guesses. You don’t have to guess about how to teach them what a sentence is or how to teach them to build sentences or make better word choices or use action verbs or topics or write closing sentences because those are all going to be included in the WriteShop curriculum and at the appropriate age and the appropriate way for that age. So if you’re just starting with little ones, you’re just going to move right through it with them. But if you’re suddenly homeschooling or you’ve neglected writing or you’ve fought it with your kids and you’re just at the point where you’ve got to get serious and we’ve all been there. This is not a slam because we’ve all had those subjects that we’ve just, oh, I just don’t want to do this. And you finally reached a point where I have got to do this. How can you do it so that it doesn’t scare you to pieces and make you feel like you can’t get it done? And so having a plan, having a step-by-step curriculum that walks you through it and tells you what to do each day and to find something that’s not going to be overwhelming for you. Like with WriteShop, one of the things that we purposely intentionally included was a variety of schedules. And no schedule is longer than four days. And at the younger levels, you’re only working three days a week. And that is going to be really helpful because it gives you all breather on the in-between days. But it also gives you room and freedom to say, okay, it’s not going well today. And that happens with anything. It’s like we all have bad days. And it’s like, I’m a mom, I need a do-over. And so our kids sometimes need those do-overs too. It’s not setting up a pattern for them to say, hey, we’re going to put this aside for now but we’ll pick it up again tomorrow when you’re fresh. We’ll start first thing in the morning, get it out of the way, and then we’ll move on. So things like that, just having those little tips and tools that you can use. One thing that’s really helpful is if your kids are argumentative about the writing process and that’s pushing your buttons because you feel insecure enough as it is, is able to have some tools to make writing more fun, making sure you’ve got some consequences in place that relate to all school work, not specifically to writing, including some incentives for doing the job well. Actually, in WriteShop Junior, there’s something in the editing process that’s called job well done. And that’s part of the editing where they are being rewarded for doing things well and you’re not just always looking for the negative.

Gretchen Roe: 00:19:34.970
If I could get you to tell a little bit of your personal experience because I think this is the point at which there’s a parent who has a son like you and I have had sons. And I think that story is going to make a tremendous difference for parents.

Kim Kautzer: 00:19:52.549
Ben is now almost 37. So we’ll back up to when he was very young and he was always super talkative and and could spin a yarn around the campfire or he was great at telling stories, great at embellishing. He was able to take in information and then repeat it back. It’s really funny because I see this in his son who is six. And I see very similar attention issues, hyper-focused where you can’t get their attention because they’re so zoomed in on what they’re doing. And when it came to academics, I just let him tag along with the sisters when he was preschool age. And then when he was in kindergarten, I started, like I did with them, just kind of jumping in and picking materials that I thought would work. And that’s when I learned that not all kids– I mean, I know that not all kids learn alike but that not all kids can use the same curriculum. Just because it worked for one child, it doesn’t always mean it will work for another. Many curricula don’t build in a variety of options for kids who are visual learners, auditory learners, kinesthetic learners like Red Shop does. And so if you’re using a curriculum that is structured for a book learner like my middle daughter was, it was a big fiasco for Ben. And over time, I began to realize he’s got all these ideas but he can’t get them out. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t write. He couldn’t form his letters very well. I kept starting and stopping the reading program and then I– but when we were studying a period of history and I would read to him out of a book that we got at the library and then ask him questions, he could respond really well. And so I started writing those things down. I’m so glad I did because it gave me a written record of his cognitive abilities even though he himself was not able to get those things written down. And this actually became one of the prime, I don’t know, encouragements for parents who were struggling to teach their kids to write because don’t we all feel guilty about doing too much for our kids? And at what point do we let them loose and become independent learners? And so with Ben, I described for him, oh, moms for years and years. It wasn’t that he wasn’t beginning to do writing along the way but his writing in no way could keep up with his mental ability and his verbal skills. So his writing would look like it was written by a six-year-old when he was maybe 10. So it really was huge for us to do that dictation. And basically what that means is you are asking leading questions to guide conversation about the topic at hand. It’s not a broad topic. You kind of narrow it down. And as they talk, you do the writing. As they get older and more skilled at getting the idea of this, of talking to mom and she writes it down, then you can start to incorporate assistive technology which works great with reluctant writers who struggle to physically write, but it also is good for kids who are verbal but have learning challenges. And so they can speak into a voice recorder. They can use Google Voice, which is actually really intuitive in spelling and syntax and all that sort of stuff. So just using a Google Doc and letting them then speak their words, they can always go back and edit. And writing is more about editing than about the first draft. It really is the editing process. And also writing is more about the idea generating process than about who does the writing. So think about a secretary for a CEO or a scribe for Plato or the Apostle Paul. They did not do their own writing sometimes. And their scribe did the writing. It doesn’t mean that the secretary gets credit for that business letter. She’s just the one who wrote it down. Michael J. Fox has Parkinson’s disease, and I can’t remember the name of the gal who is his ghostwriter. But she has said in an interview, it’s not my words. It’s his words. I’m just helping him to get them on paper. And it’s his story. So same thing with Ben. It was his story. So this whole scribing thing and working with him and two steps forward, three steps back, step forward. But we eventually started to make progress. And by the time he was in the middle of high school, everything clicked. It all came together. And his last two and a half years of high school, he was way ahead and well on track to jump right into university classes.

Gretchen Roe: 00:26:18.298
And I’m so glad that you shared that because that prefrontal cortex, we as parents fail to take into account how important that is. And it happens at different ages for different kids. My eldest son was fully 17 before that we started to see that development. My younger son was maybe 12, 13. So very different kids in the same family with the same parents. So I think the message you have here for parents is come alongside and assist and encourage until they can take the reins. Now, would you be so kind as to give these parents encouragement about where it’s been now?

Kim Kautzer: 00:27:02.433
That would be, yes, I would love to do that. I just wanted to share as part of that is what we saw when he was 5 or 6 and 8 and 12 is not who he became as 18, 20, 25. So don’t look at your 10-year-old and think this child is never going to amount to anything because they may be stuck still in the process of maturing. And for Ben, it was puberty. It was Eagle Scout trajectory. It was right shop. It was beyond right shop. It was general maturity. And all of these things played a part. It wasn’t just one thing. And so just realize that your child is multifaceted and so will be the things that will bring her or him around. So Ben went into university and started– oh, he did a debate. He started speech and debate in high school, homeschool, speech and debate. It was terrible. The first couple of years is like, ooh. But it was teaching him new skills like how to respond on the fly and rebut an argument. It taught him how to do research for a topic and how to take notes. And so there were a lot of things that he was able to use in his writing as a junior and senior through things he learned in debate as well. So that was, if you’ve got an opportunity for that, it’s great. But he ended up going to Point Loma University on a debate scholarship. And he was working toward a degree in organizational communication management or something. I don’t know. Anyway, in the middle of his junior year, he went to Scotland to study abroad for a semester. And that’s when he started taking some philosophy and theology courses in Hebrew. And he started like, ooh, this is really amazing. I’m loving this stuff. And he came back and he had been, he fell in love with where writing really took off for him was when he encountered C.S. Lewis. And then that’s when he really developed a love for writing. I mean, for reading. And that was in mid to late high school. So he came back to Point Loma, got a second– he got two degrees, the one in communication and one in philosophical theology, went to England to get his master’s degree and met the future Mrs. Counselor. And so then he came back and started applying for doctorate programs. And I will tell you that he received two offers for complete full-ride scholarships for a PhD. In another country, getting one offer is significant. Getting two, he had to make a choice. And it took him five years.

Kim Kautzer: 00:30:35.000
It was a really challenging thing for him because he’s very social and his university was four hours away by train. So it was kind of like it would be doing pandemic studies, it’s like you would be online and working at home. And he needed to work with people. So that took longer for him. But partway through, he realized he needed to switch his focus to ministry because he didn’t want to get stuck in academia and lose the heart of what he was studying. And so he went to seminary while he was getting his PhD and he actually was ordained and graduated with his PhD and they had their first son, all within three weeks. And we were there for all of it. So that was really, that was special to be able to experience that with them.

Gretchen Roe: 00:31:32.167
And I think for the parents who are listening to this, who have a son who maybe like my son, eight, nine, ten years old, is not reading, is not academically equivalent with what you perceive to be the other kids around you, I think the encouragement is to stay the course because look at what Ben has achieved. And if you had become discouraged in the process, who knows?

Kim Kautzer: 00:32:01.771
Yeah. And if I had been discouraged enough to– or not even been interested in saying, “Okay, I’ll try one more thing,” WriteShop would never have come to be. And one of the most profound things for me has been being a part of thousands upon thousands of parents’ journeys to teach their kids to write. And I feel so privileged and humbled by that, and I will never take that for granted.

Gretchen Roe: 00:32:36.014
That’s just wonderful. And I have to tell you, just in the taste I’ve had in the last two weeks, watching parents look at the materials and recognize that they don’t have to do it by themselves has just been extraordinary. I wonder if we could look a little bit at some of the questions parents ask us. I know we had some parents who were wanting to know about exploring kindergarten in first grade. And I love the way WriteShop doesn’t prescribe the writing experiences, but instead allows a student to create those writing experiences. Can you tell parents a little bit more about what that is like?

Kim Kautzer: 00:33:25.983
Oh, kindergarten and first grade are so much fun. And kids are– they’re typically not afraid, yet, of failure. And so they are just bursting with ideas and eager to talk about them. And if you can set aside the physical writing and teach it separately, but don’t worry about associating physical writing with ideas, like I mentioned earlier. So that’s one of the beauties of WriteShop Primary, is that the kids read picture books and you talk about them. And the idea is it’s a pre-writing activity that points toward their writing lesson. So the topic will be relevant and they can gain some ideas about how this book about animals– what can I say about animals if I’m telling you a story? And then you can write that down for them. But they are learning to choose their topics. They’re learning, okay, so here’s an index card. And on the front is a picture of a cupcake, and on the back it says, “Birthday.” So you have maybe a dozen of these different cards with a picture on the front, a word on the back. And you let them choose three, and you lay them out, and you maybe talk a little bit about each one, and then say, “Okay, which one do you want to help me turn into a story today?” Then they pick one card. So you’re helping them narrow topics without making it a big, scary, school-ish thing.

Kim Kautzer: 00:35:15.279
And then you ask questions. Again, if you’re using WriteShop, you’re going to have ideas for a graphic organizer that you will write out for your kids. And then, at the end of this whole thing, they publish their project as a craft. And this will be the case, actually, through all of WriteShop Primary and Junior, but the crafts, when they’re in kindergarten, they’re going to make a story kite and they’re going to make a round cylinder and take their story to the cylinder and have strips of crepe paper, streamer, whatever yarn handle, and they can fly their little kite around with their one-sentence story. And it’s a way to share what they’ve written or what they’ve dictated to you and you’ve written. Another thing with kids who are really young, especially as they’re gaining their motor skills, is they may be able to copy something that you’ve written down, like one word that you write, and then they can copy that word. We give this freedom for you to share the writing so the kids can write the words or even the letters that they know how to write and you write the rest. So lots of games and teaching through hands-on activities rather than through worksheets. These are the things that will motivate and excite little kids, kinesthetic motion activities. So that’s the philosophy of WriteShop Primary is just to get the kids excited about doing these hands-on activities to release those ideas.

Gretchen Roe: 00:37:02.237
An interesting question from actually three parents– and I collaborated because it was a 9th grader, a 10th grader, and another 10th grader. So they said, “What’s the best place to start with a reluctant 10th-grade student in the writing process, and how can you sort of open them up to possibility?”

Kim Kautzer: 00:37:25.566
First, the good news is it doesn’t matter if they are really unskilled in their writing. It doesn’t matter how much experience they’ve had or haven’t in the past. You can start any child at any age. So this will actually speak to all ages, but to your teens, you can put them in WriteShop 1 or 2. I would say for any student who is 7th through 10th grade can always start in WriteShop 1 successfully. If your child has had experience with writing, just needs a little bit of sharpening of skills, a 10th grader and older can go into WriteShop 2 because there’s some review at the beginning. So that’s first, is just knowing you just jump in where they are cognitively, not where they are in their physical ability to put pencil to paper. You don’t want to take a 10th-grader who hates writing or is reluctant and put them in a 4th or 5th-grade level because you think they’ve missed too much along the way. Just trust the process and they will learn what they need through WriteShop. So the lessons in WriteShop 1 at the very beginning and through most of the book are rarely longer than one paragraph. And this may not seem like very much and not seem very challenging when you’re teaching a high schooler, but what you’re working on at this level is the skill of honing and narrowing ideas, choosing the very best words to construct the strongest sentences in the shortest amount of space.

Kim Kautzer: 00:39:24.211
So they’re not going to be overwhelmed by writing, filling up a whole page or a five-page or five paragraphs or– they’re going to start small and they’re going to learn in the very beginning about concrete writing. What it is, how do we write concretely? How do we choose strong words over weak words? How do we use a thesaurus? Activities that practice with a thesaurus, that practice with word building and sentence building, and these are all then applied to their writing. And this is the case with all of the WriteShop lessons. There will be skills taught that are then immediately applied the writing, whether they’re third grade or in tenth. So they’re going to get what they need, the skills they need, the tools they need without having to fear or you fearing that they’ve missed something along the way. Because once they have that strong paragraph, that is the building block for a five-paragraph essay. A five-paragraph essay becomes the building block for future term papers. One paragraph becomes a five-paragraph. It can expand into five paragraphs. Five paragraphs. Each of those paragraphs can become a page in a longer report. Does that make sense?

Kim Kautzer: 00:40:47.921
And so you’re just giving them the building blocks, not just the tools, but also the size of the project. So their writing assignments start out contained. They need to write five to seven sentences. Part of it is they can’t go over either. So if you have a really motivated, I would say daughter because typically it’s the girls who– they ramble, they are wordy and they are flowery. And they will, at least in my classes– “Mrs. Counselor, please can I write eight sentences?” “No. Part of what we want to teach you is how to narrow your focus. So let’s see how you can maybe combine two short sentences into one longer sentence, or how can you take out unnecessary detail that really feels important, but it may be kind of just not necessary.” So we teach them about what we call a carrot and a cookie junk, which is basically something that has some point of familiarity in the reference, but it really doesn’t fit that context. And so those are all things that kids will learn. So because they’re starting small and you’re making the writing process a given, it’s not an option to write the first draft without brainstorming and without editing, that those are all three components that they need to do.

Kim Kautzer: 00:42:22.981
And in the team levels, we introduce a second revision, which they don’t do in the elementary. In the elementary, and in most writing curriculums, the kids write a rough draft and parents give feedback. In WriteShop, the kids write a rough draft. They have a self-editing checklist. They have to make corrections, improvements, changes, based on what they’ve been learning, based on the skills they already have. We’re not going to ask them to do something that they’ve never learned before. And then they make the changes and write a revision. And that’s what you will edit with an equally detailed checklist so you don’t throw any curves their way by picking up something that they didn’t know they needed to do. And you also know exactly what you’re looking for. So you’re instilling confidence in your reluctant writer, that you’re not going to be capricious with them. You’re not going to one day accept this error and the next day be mean about it. So it’s going to be helpful for both of you and you just start where they are and keep moving forward. It’s okay if their first draft is short. That’s what editing is for. That’s when you build out. You add more detail. You add an adjective. You add an adverb. You choose stronger words that make the writing sound more mature. These are the things that happen in the editing process. And so it’s okay if the first draft is rough because that’s what it’s supposed to be.

Gretchen Roe: 00:44:02.047
I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the student who doesn’t like the project orientation of WriteShop I & II and just wants to [dragnet?] this. They just want to write the document. Can you talk about why that project orientation has a place and why it’s important?

Kim Kautzer: 00:44:22.580
It does, and the projects happen in two different places. They happen in the pre-writing when you’re doing a writing game or an activity that your child might feel like it’s more than they want to do. They’re “Just the facts, ma’am” kind of kids. If you look over those games and activities and see what they’re teaching and make sure your kids understand those concepts, you can certainly skip that stuff. But if you want to skip it because you’re a just the facts mom, I would really encourage you to do them anyway because most kids are kinesthetic learners. They age out of that as they mature. So it’s like some students will always be hands-on kinesthetic learners. Ben was very kinesthetic all through elementary school, and he became a more logical spatial thinker as he got older, and he’s less hands-on. I mean, he enjoys hands-on things, but it’s not his main learning style anymore. But with little kids, it often is, and so don’t skip those activities because you don’t like them.

Kim Kautzer: 00:45:56.649
Kids are [vocking?], and you don’t see that it’s beneficial for them. And they’re getting the concept if you teach it a different way, that’s totally fine. Now at the end of each lesson, there’s going to be some kind of publishing. In the elementary books, the publishing project will be some kind of a craft, like that kite that I talked about earlier. They may make a– so they do a lot of file folders where they make little books, or they work on beginning, middle, and end, and you cut the flaps on these books to make it– it kind of reinforces an activity. Sometimes it will involve making a diorama. And if your child is not a crafty kid, and those kinds of things are not appealing, the back of the WriteShop, I think beginning in book C – I don’t remember, book B or C – we begin suggesting alternative ways to publish the project. And sometimes it’s as simple as just neatly typing it and putting it in a folder. Sometimes it’s mounting it on a piece of construction paper instead of turning it into a fluffier craft. Sometimes it’s other simpler ways to publish that might still appeal to them, but they’re not as time-consuming or craft oriented as others. And so you might find something there that they could use.

Kim Kautzer: 00:47:34.439
But the purpose of it is every kid needs an audience. Every kid needs to publish that final draft in the best way he or she can. We don’t want to just leave it at a rough draft. We want to take it to the next level so they really feel proud of their accomplishment. And if you keep a portfolio, that’s where you’re going to put those final drafts or even an assortment of them. When we were teaching our writing class at the end of the year, we would take the kids’ best poem and a couple of their best compositions and create an anthology that we would have printed and pass out to all the students at our year-end T. And they loved looking through that book and finding their own– and I remember that. I remember being in second grade and we had the Heinz Herald and you might get your poem or something put in there. And it just meant so much to me that my poem got picked to put in Heinz Herald. You can make a family, whatever, however you want to do this. It’s just important for kids to have an audience of somebody besides you.

Gretchen Roe: 00:48:47.524
I think that’s really true. And I’m so glad that you mentioned Michael J. Fox’s ghostwriter. Actually, next month, we have a professional ghostwriter who is going to join me for talking about writing down your family’s story. And I’m really excited to have Maggie join me. I’ve known her for a number of years. She is absolutely fabulous at helping parents look at the larger picture and pull out the memories that will be important for you, because we all think we’re going to remember the wonderful stuff and we don’t. And we just don’t because life interferes. So I’m really excited that you mentioned a ghostwriter so that we can talk about that some more. We are almost to the end of the hour. And I wonder if you have any closing thoughts for parents who maybe have used other writing curricula that have been more prescribed and have maybe lost a little bit of the joy in this journey and how they might be able to find a way to restore it using Writeshop’s tools.

Kim Kautzer: 00:50:03.219
I think that a lot of writing programs out there have great value and are successful in teaching what they teach because they wouldn’t be around and have stood the test of time if there wasn’t some effectiveness and value. But not every child is going to learn in the same way. And if there is not a lot of option to write or learn to write differently, it can be a sticking point for struggling students or kids who have lost their love. I hear this a lot when I’m at conventions and talking to parents and it’s just like, “Gosh, my kid loved to write. And then we tried this program and then it just kind of squished it.” So I would say there are a few things that you can do to bring back the fun and the joy. And one, you can do this no matter what, is let your kids have choice in the topics they write about. You might get bored reading about horses or Pokemon or soccer. But if that is your kid’s passion, they are going to be way more invested in the writing if they love the topic. So rather than in a curriculum that says you’re describing a place and they have you describe your bedroom and your kid does not have any interest in describing the bedroom, In Writeshop, the kids are given like 10 different ideas and a blank space that says other so that they can pick the place that sounds fun and exciting for them. And then another thing is just, of course, being able or to take advantage in all the games and activities, the crafts, the picture books, the graphic organizers, these things all make the writing a whole lot more fun and engaging. And write shop is just, especially in the younger levels, is geared to teach kids the way they learn, which is with that element of fun. If kids did not require fun in their diet, we wouldn’t have aisles of toys at Target. It’s part of how they learn, and part of what brings joy to their childhood. Another thing is let some of their writing be silly. It doesn’t always have to be serious. It can happen in their regular writing, like in some of the writing assignments they may be asked to write a story that’s humorous, and they’re going to learn the tools to write a funny story.

Kim Kautzer: 00:53:03.217
But we also, if you ever get to the Write Shop blog, in the sidebar there is a section on a category of writing prompts and journal prompts. There are just dozens and dozens and dozens of fun things like would you rather prompts, like maybe 10 would you rather prompts? So would you rather be bald or have lettuce for hair? And it’s just stuff like that, so writing prompts about silly writing prompts about animals, or I don’t know. There’s just writing prompts about specific topics that the kids might really love. Writing prompts about horses, about cats, about dogs, about camping. And so you can find topical prompts that are just, they’re going to appeal to kids.

Gretchen Roe: 00:53:51.939
So Kim, we’re at the top of the hour. It’s gone way too fast. I’ve enjoyed it so very much. I wish you a fabulous trip. But I hope maybe we can do this again sometime because I’ve learned so much from you. And one of the things that I took away is if children are argumentative about the writing process, is to incentivize them for a job well done. And I think sometimes as parents, we forget that we’re incentivized all the time. And so we need to couple that in the writing process for our children as well. And I think that is terrific. Thank you all so much. And thank you too for saying probably the most important thing you said, was don’t think that they’re stuck at 8 or 10 or 12 because you don’t see the whole picture and so many things play a part. And that is just so terrific. And do you have any closing words for our parents today?

Kim Kautzer: 00:54:53.246
Oh, parents. I just want to encourage you that you can do this. If you’re a brand-new homeschooler, and this all feels really overwhelming and scary, just do things. It’s like how we teach writing. It’s bite-sized pieces. You’ve heard the expression maybe, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How do you write a term paper? One sentence becomes a paragraph, becomes a page. Just take it small, take it slow, and realize that it’s okay to learn alongside your kids, and you’re not going to fail them. I and Gretchen, both veteran homeschoolers, have made our share of mistakes and things we would do differently. But our kids are all productive adults. And that’s something I want you to just hang on to, is do what you can with what you have and believe the best in yourself.

Gretchen Roe: 00:55:56.040
Absolutely, absolutely. Kim, thank you so much for this time. I very greatly appreciate you and the fact that even in your newly retired status, you’re still willing to talk about this love of your life. So thank you so very much, and we’ll look forward to continuing the conversation again sometime.

Kim Kautzer: 00:56:14.198
That would be great. I’d love it. And I’m looking forward to seeing you at some conferences.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:18.552
Yes, we’re going to have a great time.

Kim Kautzer: 00:56:20.619
It’s going to be too much fun. Alright. Thank you.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:24.257
Take care, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Bye-bye. This is Gretchen Roe for the Demme Learning Show. Thanks for joining us. You can access the show notes, and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show, or go on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it.

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