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[00:00:04] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show, and I am so excited to welcome these two ladies this afternoon to talk to you about WriteShop. You ever have one of those serendipitous moments where you have a conversation and it goes in a different direction than you anticipate, and then it just blossoms into something amazing? Rhonda Helmreich was a guest of mine last fall when we were talking about group learning, and it was just an amazing experience. Right at the very end of the conversation, Rhonda mentioned using WriteShop in her communities, and so we’re going to talk about that today.

I’m delighted to invite Lisa Pfeifer to join us today. Lisa works with Rhonda and is the instructor for WriteShop. We’re going to have a great time today. I’m going to let Rhonda introduce herself and begin with an explanation of her homeschooling experiences and then why she found her way to WriteShop. Rhonda, take it away, and then we’ll get to you, Lisa.

[00:01:12] Rhonda Helmreich: Absolutely. I homeschooled my five children, and I have to tell you, I didn’t start with homeschooling. I was actually a public school teacher, and my older two were in public school for a while and pulled them home at seventh grade and third grade, and I just never looked back. The younger three followed through. I’ve launched them all. They’re now past college and in careers and doing great.

My experience with realizing that my oldest was– I didn’t think that I was going to pull out cow eyeballs and talk about biology with her. I found some dear friends who were– I call it smart girls. I found my smart friends, and we just started working together and found our giftings of areas of where we could teach. That’s where it came to, where we ended up. Crazy as it could be, I am still in the homeschool world working with students and teachers and just promoting good learning, basically.

I’m super excited about WriteShop because I found it years ago. It was in the middle, like past my older two but before I did the younger three. I was so excited because– I don’t know if you had this experience where you– I remember going to college and thinking the mystery of writing is going to be solved because I got this professor where it was going to be one-on-one instruction. Y’all, it was the same thing. It was mysterious. I found and saw WriteShop. I just want to read to you– Just hold on there. I’m going to tell you why this is so amazing.

It’s so good because this woman who created WriteShop does what she said she would do. She takes the mystery out of writing. She makes it so that every person can develop the writer within, and writing is just thinking on paper. I love what she does. I’m going to give the example of a puzzle, and I know this is weird. Just imagine that you’re supposed to do a puzzle and the person just hands you all the pieces and says, “Somehow, put this together and make something creative and amazing.” You’re like, “Well, these are all lovely pieces and they have all these little different colors and all these little different shapes, but I don’t know what to do with them.”

What she does in WriteShop is she shows the children and students– she shows them the picture of the puzzle, and then breaks it down and shows how to put all those little pieces in. That’s the magic of it.

[00:04:17] Gretchen: Absolutely. Rhonda, you were using WriteShop with your own children before you were using it in a group experience. Right?

[00:04:26] Rhonda: Correct, yes.

[00:04:29] Gretchen: Then you brought it to the group experience and you introduced Lisa to it.

[00:04:33] Rhonda: That is correct, yes. She thought that she would like a different writing program. Then I said, “No, you don’t. You would like this one.” Then she said yes. After she used it for a while, she was like, “Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love this.”

[00:04:50] Gretchen: The power of homeschool parents and persuasion, right? [laughs] Lisa, you’ve waited patiently for us to get started. Tell us a little bit about your homeschool journey.

[00:05:00] Lisa Pfeifer: My homeschool journey, I started out before having kids as an ELA teacher and English language arts in public school, and I taught in some private schools. It was like my own experience going through junior high and high school. There really was no writing curriculum. Even when I was teaching, I would be handed student textbooks, no teacher additions, and told to figure it out. Like that goes, I really wanted a formula, and through my years of even teaching my own kids and trying different curriculums that I had used with my academically gifted child, one curriculum worked with my dyslexic child, nothing worked. It was very complicated figuring that out.

I have three daughters and a son. What I discovered about my son was he just wanted the bare minimum from me. When I started teaching in this homeschool co-op with Mrs. Helmreich, she told me about WriteShop, and I was like, “Well, I’ve used this one and I’ve used this one,” but even in my own experience, what I had seen is there were certain kids that really struggled, and then there were certain kids that got it.

I hadn’t found the perfect thing yet. When she said, “I really want you to try WriteShop,” I was like, okay. When I decided that that year when I taught it, I was going to write papers along with the kids because I never had a writing curriculum either. Every week I wrote the same paper that the kids were writing so that I could get an idea of where they might struggle, what directions they might understand, might not understand. It was amazing because WriteShop was the most clear thing I had ever used. For anyone that wants a step-by-step do this, then do this, then do this, this is your curriculum.

The way that WriteShop is laid out with the lesson plans, that’s the other thing I love. I didn’t have to create lesson plans or create a formula to teach this curriculum. It’s all there. When I followed that plan, you teach Lesson 1, you teach Lesson 2, and then you review Lesson 1 and you review Lesson 2. The beauty of that teaching in a classroom is I had a week to grade all those papers, put comments on the kids’ pages. The next week they’d start their new paper, and then the following week I would get to take them all back to the papers that I had graded.

We got to go through those step by step, point by point, and say, “Hey, did you forget to count your to-be verbs?” It was beautiful using the checklist and the way that the curriculum is laid out to give me time for each thing and time to review. I know kids when they want to write their papers, they want to write sloppy copy, first revision, final draft all on the same day. I would send them emails each week reminding them to space each thing out. They could do brainstorming on Mondays, sloppy copy on Tuesdays, first revision on Wednesdays.

Then when they would bring those to class, they’d get a week of distance from them so that when they got to come back to Lesson 1 they were seeing them with fresh eyes. Kim Kautzer and Debra Oldar, brilliant the way they laid it out. Even for homeschool parents that are doing this at home with one child at a time, it’s a lovely layout because you’re teaching your student healthy writing skills. Not just like in college where I would stay up until 8:00 AM the next morning writing a paper that was due at 8:30 AM.

[00:08:50] Gretchen: I understand that intimately. [laughs]

[00:08:54] Lisa: Teaching them a healthy pattern of writing, distance from the writing, to come back to it with fresh eyes. It’s a beautiful curriculum, and I’ll never go to anything else. I absolutely–

[00:09:05] Gretchen: That’s a wonderful testimony. I will tell you that Kim Kautzer developed this idea with a son who was extraordinarily reluctant to write and had some learning challenges. That young man is now a grown adult and a PhD. I think that that is testimony to her commitment to making it work. That is the hallmark of a homeschool mom. We just kind of figure it out.

[00:09:32] Lisa: I’m going to just talk parents through the way that I teach using the checklist and things like that. I want to start by giving you an example of a student checklist. I love the WriteShop workbook for kids. It’s all black and white, but that gives me an opportunity to pull out the handy dandy highlighters. I buy a set for all of my kids and I have them highlight important things, for a couple of reasons. One, because I know that they will not remember everything I say, so I want them to be able to go back when they get home and look at individual things that they highlighted as reminders. “Oh, I need to circle my to-be verbs. I need to find my vague words. I need to find repeated words.”

We have a color code, and even on the checklist, it says “Circle to-be verbs in red. Circle vague words in green.” It has specific instructions as it’s teaching kids step by step how to check their own work. I love that because we want kids to be self-reflective and able to evaluate their own work. That way, when I go to my teacher checklist– and I love colors, I highlight my own checklists. This one is from Lesson 14 near the end of the first-year curriculum.

At the end of the year, they’re able to start a sentence with paired adjectives. To start a sentence with present participles. To start a sentence with an LY adverb. To use a simile. To use an appositive. We call them sentence starters, and anytime a child highlights a subordinate conjunction in the middle of a sentence, I’m saying, is this at the start? Because we’re only highlighting starters. It’s a lot of fun using the teacher checklist. It’s for parents or teachers. The beauty of this checklist is it helps us to see if they followed everything. They get their own feedback first and then they get my feedback second.

Then I’m going to take you just to a regular chapter. In a classroom setting, I usually have 20 students, 15 of them are boys. It’s magical because I think boys especially love this curriculum. Not at first. My son was one of my students when he started WriteShop. I would say, “Buddy, all of your sentences have six words. What’s up with that?” He says, “Mom, you be extra, I’m going to be basic.” He’s in high school now and he’s getting incredible grades in English. He would tell me all these stories about how he didn’t want me to be his teacher, he didn’t want to have anything to do with writing, but in his English classes in high school, already he has top marks.

He’s a phenomenal writer and he didn’t want to be. That is the beauty of this curriculum. When I taught the class that he was in, I would take the kids through the lesson and have them highlight the most important things. I do this even if I’m doing a ladies’ Bible study. I’m looking for the verbs. I highlight the verbs because I want to know what am I supposed to do. I do that with the kids. I help them highlight the most important things. The beauty of WriteShop is that every single chapter has step-by-step instructions. As you can see on this page, number one, brainstorming. It has a brainstorming worksheet for the kids, and we’ll get to that.

Then it says number two, body of the paragraph. This is what you’re going to do. Number three, these are the sentence variations you’re going to do. I have them highlight them. We have a code for pink present participles, blue paired adjectives, yellow similes, green adverbs, purple prepositions. We have a system, and we do it every time so that they get into a routine because my goal for them is that writing becomes automatic and the things that they need, sentence by sentence by sentence, they already know.

They just are getting the hang of good sentences to the point that when they get to Chapter 9 and 10, and they have a restriction that they– My students just did Chapter 10 biography, and they’re only allowed to use one to-be verb and they can have no more than five sentences. These kids are losing their minds because they’ve had a semester-plus to write good sentences, to get some meaty stuff into their paragraph. Now I’m telling them no more than five sentences or you’re losing points. They’re having to learn how to prioritize what’s important.

One thing that I would encourage teachers to do is to get the digital version of the student workbook as well. There’s also a teacher manual that’s very helpful. Having a digital workbook for me as a teacher means that if we have a snow day, I can teach on Zoom and I can pull up slides of the lecture for the day and show the kids what I want them to highlight. Also, I had a student that was absent. The reason Lesson 9 is really well done is because I had a student that was absent that week. I sent his mom the answers so that she would have an idea of how to teach the lesson. Although if she had had nothing but the student workbook, she would’ve made it because it’s step by step by step.

[00:15:19] Gretchen: Lisa, one of the things I think that is remarkable here is you are such an enthusiastic proponent, but you’re also– you majored in English. How does that translate for the parent who’s like, when you say, “I want you to learn to teach your student writing,” they panic. I think you’ve outlined that because it’s all explicated for them.

[00:15:42] Lisa: One of the things that I have done with parents is I send out a weekly email for students and parents – it goes to both of their emails – with instructions where I break down the homework for the week because I do like the kids to space it out. I tell them the beauty of this curriculum is I just need three days a week from you. We can get it all done Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We have a co-op on Thursdays. A lot of kids have a Friday co-op or a Tuesday co-op. I try to reassure parents the kids are going to need you three days a week. You pick your three.

Then if we focus on brainstorming, sloppy copy, first revision, I just remind the parents, “If you follow the student checklist or just the directions in the chapter step by step, they’re going to get it.” I also encourage the parents that their student may need a little help the first few weeks, but when we get to Christmas, I’m going to tell the parents to do this, hands off. It’s time to let those kids fly and let’s see what they can do. That’s when they are following directions or I’m getting on their case then, “Hey, the reason I ask you to do those skill builders is because they help you write the good sentences.”

We just follow through and check, but for parents who send their kids for a co-op, this is a lovely thing because they have a teacher to give their child feedback. The beauty of homeschooling is that we get to teach our own kids our own way. For some of our kids, at a certain age, my son did not want my input anymore. It just depends on your kids. For the kids that are ready to have feedback from somebody else, the co-op situation for us was just a answer to prayer because it gave our kids an opportunity to learn from someone else. The beauty of this curriculum is that parents can follow along.

[00:17:43] Gretchen: One of the things that also is beautiful about this, if you don’t have the opportunity to learn from someone else, having that checklist takes the push-pull of, “Oh, you don’t like what I wrote, so you’re grading me harshly.” If you’ve got a document that outlines how you need to do those materials, then we’ve sort of taken the emotion out of it. That’s just tremendous.

[00:18:07] Lisa: Yes. That too with my son. I would say, “Hey, buddy, why don’t you go back to your checklist, see where it asks you to count your to-be verbs? Will you please do that, and then write the number on there?” I was blessed to be able to teach him in a classroom where I had parents who were assistants, and they helped to grade the papers. I would make sure to give my son’s paper to them so that they could give him feedback.

Again, like you said, this is a step-by-step thing for parents where they don’t have to reinvent the wheel, they don’t have to think stuff up. Like you said, they have the backing of a document, of a checklist that says, “No, I’m not telling you what to do. The checklist is telling you what to do. Follow the instructions, that’s all you got to do.”

[00:19:00] Gretchen: Right. That’s amazing.

[00:19:02] Lisa: What I will say is that the brainstorming sheets in each chapter are lovely because they ask questions. A lot of times when I was growing up, a teacher would say, “Here’s your topic to write on. Don’t forget to brainstorm,” and we had no idea what brainstorming was. There are other curriculums out there. I think Four Square Writing is one that has lots of brainstorming ideas, but what I like about WriteShop is our brainstorming sheets ask questions. If the student answers those questions, it gets them where they’re going. They have everything they need to write their paper right on the brainstorming sheet.

[00:19:44] Gretchen: Which is really pretty terrific, particularly because a lot of us who were raised in educational environments where the teacher said, “Now, make sure you brainstorm,” and we all sat there going, “What does that mean?” As you just explained, we come into the parenting exchange going, “Okay. I know my kid needs to brainstorm, but I don’t know how to do that.” It’s really impossible to teach something you have not been taught.

[00:20:10] Lisa: Yes. On this brainstorming sheet, in Lesson 9, at the very end, it asked the student, “What is the most interesting fact about your animal or critter that you’re writing about?” I chose to write about hermit crabs and the way that they explode out of their shells, exoskeleton. Notice it says, right under most interesting fact, use this information in your topic sentence. It even tells them, okay, you’re going to use a question-answer format. You’re going to say what animal uses water pressure to explode out of its habitat? Then you answer it with the second sentence.

It even gives them, this is how to do it exactly. Parents don’t have to create it in their minds, it’s all done for them. So many good examples of common mistakes that students might make, they cover those. It’s lovely. Of everything I’ve used, it’s lovely. I can’t say enough good things about it because it’s just been life-changing. Even for my own writing, because I didn’t have a writing curriculum. WriteShop has taught me how to write.

[00:21:21] Gretchen: You’ve encouraged me. I didn’t have the opportunity to use WriteShop, and I taught creative writing both in a co-op experience and then to my own children. Now I want to dig deeper into it from a personal perspective to see if it can improve my writing. I’ll admit, I’m the goddess of the to-be verb. I always have to go back to it. Take this one out, take this one out. If you weren’t taught to do that it becomes very difficult to do. All right, Lisa. What else do you have to show us here in this PowerPoint?

[00:21:53] Lisa: Skill builders. Each lesson has a set of skill builders. When we tell students to begin a sentence with a participial phrase, they of course have no idea what that is. We talk to them about ING verbs. Present tense, ING, it’s happening right now verbs, and how to put them in a phrase. The lovely thing is we’re teaching them sentence starters like the participle phrase or the prepositional phrase starter or the paired adjective starter.

The skill builders again are teaching us as parents exactly how to do that in a very simple, straightforward way so that when we talk about misplaced modifiers, I keep helping the kids focus on after the sentence starter phrase has a comma. Right after that comma, that is where the thing that’s doing that is supposed to be, the modifier is supposed to be. I love the skill builders because we get lots of practice doing them. There are different instructions. The kids create the beginning of the sentence or the end of the sentence or the middle.

What I love doing and what the kids enjoy in the class is I use my own children as part of the stories. I think I have, “Shouting wildly, the excited fans cheered for another touchdown.” A lot of them I will use something local. I’m in Dallas. We talk about the paper boy tossing the Dallas Morning News, but sometimes I’ll make them goofy and I’ll throw in my children Jonathan or Aisy. “Dancing like a ballerina, Aisy drove her brother crazy.” Something silly. The kids will laugh and then they’ll create their own. I tease them and I say, “I give bonus points if you’ll put family members in your skill builders.”

This is how I get to know your family and the crazy that you have because they see the crazy that I have. It’s a great way to connect with the kids too, with the skill builders. Even at home, for moms and dads who are teaching this curriculum to their kids, you are giving your child freedom to be goofy and silly. My son loved making the worst sentences imaginable. He liked using all of the harsh words like, “I slapped that pancake onto a plate.” He liked using those hitting words, I don’t know. Anyways, it’s a great way to connect with the students or your children and be silly. Make up fun things.

I also tell my students that in their papers they’re allowed to lie or embellish. We use embellish or tell little stories. I tell them, “If you make up a phony sibling in all of your papers, include that sibling. At the end of the year, I’m going to give you bonus points if you say, ‘By the way, little Elliot doesn’t exist.” I tell them this is how I get to know your family, who you are. At the end of the year– I had one girl last year who incorporated chickens in every one of her papers because she raises chickens.

[00:25:09] Gretchen: That’s awesome.

[00:25:10] Lisa: There’s a lot of ways you can play this, but WriteShop makes it so simple you can have so much fun with it.

[00:25:17] Gretchen: I am so delighted with your stories here because it allows a parent to see themselves in the frame of being able to understand how they would do this.

[00:25:27] Rhonda: I just wanted to add one little thing here. That Lisa is amazing, as we can all see.

[00:25:33] Gretchen: Yes. I’m wishing she could teach me some creative writing.

[00:25:37] Rhonda: Correct. She’s wonderful. I just want to encourage parents and tell you that– She was saying, “Just give me three days. You can do this in three days.” Teaching the child the separation of that you need fresh eyes on things. Did you hear the space that Lisa was actually giving parents? It’s not like you have to get something graded that second. It’s that you have this weak turnaround and you want that weak turnaround. The other thing was right in the book, in the Teacher book, it tells you how to choose a schedule. You have choices. You could follow Lisa’s example, modify Lisa’s example, but what I want parents to know, you guys, it’s there. The support is incredible.

[00:26:34] Gretchen: That’s awesome to hear. I think often what I hear from parents when I travel around homeschool conferences across the US is next to public speaking, teaching your kids writing is the scariest thing on the planet. As a homeschool parent myself, that wasn’t nearly as scary as teaching my kids math. It depends on what your own experiences were. If you had an instructor who didn’t encourage you, who maybe was the goddess of the red pen and gave you a really hard time, then it’s really hard to step outside that framework and apply it with your kids.

I think Kim has done a wonderful job conceiving of how to step around the things that give us parental anxiety and make it a doable enterprise.

[00:27:27] Rhonda: Yes. I love Lisa’s story too, where she’s talking about laughing with the kids about word choices. How good is that, to sit there and just simply enjoy language and getting to the point of this is why the to-be verbs are in a way boring. Look at all these other choices we have to create our scene, to create our image that we want to put in people’s minds when they read our work, and to express ourselves. I love that. She’s like, yes, I so like the hitting words. [laughs] How else is that expressing yourself, but well done.

[00:28:11] Gretchen: You all said that you have more boys in these classes than you do girls. That to me is absolutely remarkable because the hardest thing in the world is to get a boy to tell you a story beyond just the facts. I used to tell my boys I don’t want dragnet. I want a story that has more color and texture to it.

[00:28:35] Lisa: I had a student a couple of years ago, Gretchen, who told me on the first day at school, “I don’t like writing.” He said, “I’d like to play baseball. I’m going to hate this class this year.” I said, “I hear you, buddy.” By the end of the year, he told me he thought he might become a writer. Each year he wrote the funniest, most hilarious story. Every week I would read his papers and I would just roll on the floor laughing. I would tell him, “Your papers are cracking me up. If for no other reason than you’re hilarious and you’re following the rules, you’re acing this class.” Then the next year when he started with WriteShop II with another teacher, he started bringing me his papers. “Look how I did, Mrs. Pfeifer.” It was hilarious to me. His mom came to me and she said, “I do not know how you did it. He loves you.” I said, “All I did was tell him he could lie his butt off all year long on his papers, and he was happy as a clam.” The truth was he got good at embellishing his stories and making them humorous. He got good at using the word list in the back of the book. I’ll take the kids to the word list.

The word lists are incredible. It has a whole list of adverbs they can choose from. It has lists of color words, sound words, touch words, everything they need to write a good paper. WriteShop does encourage them to use Thesaurus type of thing. I’ve still, myself, never figured out how to use the Thesaurus correctly. The word list in the back of the book, I just keep telling the kids, “Go to the back of the book. The word lists are there. Everything you need is in this workbook.”

[00:30:21] Gretchen: Yes. One of the things that I love about those word lists is we were looking for a word to replace a word that had been repeated in a blog a couple of weeks ago. I went, “Wait a minute. I know where I can go find that.” Here I am digging in the word lists in a WriteShop book. A cool way to be able to do that, which is really awesome.

The one thing you haven’t said, ladies, which is elemental to WriteShop, is that it’s not prescriptive. We’re not going to tell you you have to write about baseball if you have no interest in baseball. Can you talk a little bit about how, Lisa, you might’ve had one essay but a variety of different presentations of that essay because kids chose different subjects?

[00:31:12] Lisa: Yes. Lesson 8 is a how-to paper. They get to tell you how to do something. The beauty of this chapter is even if they’re choosing something simple– and I did have a few kids choose how to sharpen a pencil. I was like, “Don’t leave out any steps. I don’t want to hurt myself because we’re going to try this out.” One of the things that I would do was, for that class, I would bring in marshmallows and toothpicks and I would pass them out to the class.

Then I would stand facing away from them and talk them through how to make a square basically by putting the– but I’d have to give them step by step. When I got done and turned around, they had all manner of toothpicks in every direction. I told them, “See, this is why steps are important, because we’re trying to teach somebody how to do something.”

When we first did this paper, my headlights had gone out of my old, old, old minivan. My husband and I used a YouTube video to teach us how to replace the headlights. I did my paper on how to replace a Pontiac Montana’s headlights. We used pictures, but I had kids’ “How to make pancakes.” They would put pictures in their paper and use each of their sentence starters. It couldn’t sound too much like a recipe. It had to sound like instructions. The kids picked what they loved. One told us how to– He was a hockey player and he told us how to shoot. I don’t know.

I love hockey, but I don’t know the terms for slapshots or– I don’t know what they are, or even the hockey stick, what it’s called. I just love seeing those guys slam against the glass. The kids got to talk about what they were passionate about and teach us how to make it. We got lots of cookies, but we got pancakes. My son did his on how to make Death Star waffles. That was the one where he used “Slap the pancake onto the plate and slather it in butter.” His best words sounded really goofy.

[00:33:28] Gretchen: I do recall making one of my kids write a process paper, and he wrote it on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Then I took him to the kitchen and said, “Okay. You’re going to read your paper to me and I’m going to do exactly what you said.” We ended up with peanut butter smeared on the countertop, and he’s looking at me like, “What are you doing? “I said, “Well, I did exactly what you said. All of a sudden, he said, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t explain that correctly.” We still laugh about that to this day.

Rhonda, now, you teach advanced writing skills beyond WriteShop. Tell us, as a writing instructor, what it’s like to get a child who’s gone through this process with Lisa.

[00:34:190] Rhonda: This is a beautiful thing, [chuckles] is I find that kids who have been taught with a very formulaic type of writing, that they don’t become thinkers. The way this is taught, it is teaching thinking along with the writing process. Again, writing is thinking, thinking is writing. If you’re not teaching children how to think, it’s not a good program. This is giving all those tools, getting them to the point with them. Then all I’m doing is I’m putting polish, to answer your question specifically.

It’s wonderful to get these kids because I’m not trying to breathe life into them. They’re ready for those next steps. They’re ready for assertions and proofs from text, and more academic type of writing. I’m not focused in fixing their sentence structure. They have the very sentence structure. They have the knowledge not to be using to-be words, but constantly. I mean, a few. They’ve also, I believe, learned the process that you as a writer are responsible – just like your son tried to do – to leave you in the dust and didn’t guide the reader’s mind properly. As a writer, that is responsibility to guide that mind.

[00:35:54] Gretchen: [laughs] It’s funny you should say that. I’m in the middle of a book right now that my daughter talked me into reading. It just annoys me because the author leaves all these threads hanging. She keeps saying to me, “Just hang in here, Mom. I promise you it’ll be worth it.” Right now I’m just annoyed with this author because there are so many hanging pieces, and I’m like, “Wait, how did we get from here to here? What happened here?” She said, “It’ll all come together.” I’m not a very patient person, so that come-together part, it’s a little bit hard to master.

[00:36:32] Rhonda: They think too with parents with– Again, you’re talking about reading. Reading good language, reading good literature is so much a part of this whole writing process too. That’s why this is not a sterile– what you were saying. This is not a formulatic boring type of thing. This is allowing for that creativity to come forth and for some of the things that they’ve heard over the years, right? It’s going to come through. It should awaken what has been fed into them.

[00:37:09] Gretchen: Sure. One of the things you all said yesterday, which I knew but it’s always good to be reminded of, is you had kids at different ages in this program.

[00:37:21] Rhonda: That’s right.

[00:37:23] Gretchen: Lisa, can you talk a little bit about that? What is your experiences? Because the teenage boys come to the table at wildly different developmental places.

[00:37:36] Lisa: Yes. I have taught WriteShop I to seventh to 10th graders. I was also teaching it at another co-op and they wanted their sixth graders to take it. Just sixth graders. My observation was that these homeschool sixth graders could handle WriteShop I, but they needed hands-on parents to do their work each week. It took a little bit more of parental involvement. I taught, but my emails to parents were really instructive in “Check this, make sure they have counted their to-be verbs,” some things like that, just to account for the immaturity of a 12-year-old.

Then I have also taught it from seventh– I have a student in my class this year who’s in 10th grade, and his mom just felt developmentally that he was not ready for this a couple of years ago. I have seen eighth-grade boys in particular do amazing in WriteShop I, but every year I have seventh-grade boys as well and girls. I think the girls, it doesn’t seem to matter what age, the boys developmentally, it matters. When they come to me as seventh graders, their moms are still used to helping and being that under support. I see the eighth-grade boys that come into that curriculum are a bit more independent just because of maturity. I see the curriculum being very accessible.

I have had girls who they want to dive in to all the flowery. They remind me of the Anne of Green Gables. They want to romanticize their papers and show all of these things. I have to help them rein it in a little bit to learn good sentence structure first and then let them fly. I have these girls come to me during our breaks when I’m grading papers from previous years. They’re like, “Hi, Ms. Pfeifer. How are you doing?” I’ll ask them, “Hey, how’s your WriteShop II class going? How are you doing in there?” They’re like, “Oh man, my papers are really good. I’m doing this and I’m doing that.

The three paragraphs, it’s so easy now because I know how each paragraph is supposed to go. It’s really fun to hear the kids that come back to me because they want to know, “How’s your class this year, Ms. Pfeiffer? Are they telling any good stories? Are the boys, getting it?” It’s really comical the kids that come back because they want to find out how the new crop is going.

[00:40:13] Gretchen: You said something earlier that I wanted to circle back around to. You were talking about biographies and– What did you say, six sentences?

[00:40:20] Lisa: Five.

[00:40:20] Gretchen: Five sentences.

[00:40:22] Lisa: Yes.

[00:40:22] Gretchen: You’re teaching them to write a LinkedIn profile.

[00:40:25] Lisa: Exactly. I’m trying to help them hone in on what are the most important things that you can say about Rosa Parks or about Abraham Lincoln or about– I think I got Kobe Bryant as one. The kids get to pick. When you ask how out there does it go? I’ve read some Taylor Swift papers last week, some Katy Perry. Whoever the kids– Sabrina Carpenter, everybody wants to talk about her. I get to read who they think is important and then they have to– we cover the mocks. The main accomplishment, the obstacle they had to overcome, character qualities, and supporting facts for their character.

They have to include all of these things in five sentences. I tell them, “These are going to be the meatiest sentences you write and you get one to be “to be” verb.

[00:41:17] Gretchen: That’s pretty remarkable to be able to do that. You’re asking them to do that, starting with kids that might not have had writing experiences in the beginning of the year last year. In these last 15 minutes, tell me if I’m a parent and I’m comparing programs, what are the things I need to look for to make sure that I have all of the elements? You guys have done a fantastic job, but look at this from the perspective of the parent who says, “I’d rather eat a hair sandwich than teach my kid to write.” What would each of you say are the three most important things to take away from the program of how it’s going to help a parent be successful?

[00:41:59] Rhonda: The one thing I’m going to tell you is this: trust the process. So many times parents are– You’re looking for maybe like instant fix or instant quick, whatever it is, but this is well thought out. There’s not gigantic potholes that you’re going to hit. You may hit a pothole with your kid in dealing with them, that’s true, but if you just relax and trust the process– Then the biggest thing I can tell you to do is, “Go back and think where were we three weeks ago? Where are we now? You have to own and take those small victories, is what you have to do.

I know it’s harder when it’s so personal when they’re your own children than in a co-op situation. It is different. To be honest, it is different. We still get exasperated with kids that we know have all kinds of potential, and you know your child and the games they’re playing or whatever. I would say, trust in that process and just work it through. Some days are going to be hard. There might be a tear, but if it gets to that point, then stop and do something goofy and come back and revisit. That’s one piece I have.

The other piece would be to be inspiring for them is to be reading– Again, go back, be reading good literature to them. As you’re reading to them, pointing out, “Oh man. Well, what if they had said it this way? What if they had done this or that? Would that impact feel?” What that’s doing is it’s training your child to start to think about words and how they matter. I’m not one of those people that really likes those programs where they sit there and they get– I call it like– They get in the dirt too much. If you think of your child as a little plant, you give them lots of sunshine and you give them rain and these are all the things that they need. The skills and things.

I don’t try to get in there and dig too much because then that’s so discouraging. I guess that’s that big red pen person. It’s more looking for like, “Oh my gosh, how did you think of that? I love that word. That word, it’s just so good that you chose– right? It’s pointing those things out to them. It’s showing them the sunshine. Maybe you have to take the hoe occasionally to something, you know, if you got a root out to-be verbs or something.

[00:44:48] Gretchen: I love that analogy though, because I think particularly as parents, we are so concerned. We want a good outcome no matter what. We’re going to get in there with a hoe because we want it to be just the best it can possibly be. Maybe we don’t need to do that so much. I’m getting the impression from both of you that it sort of gives you a set of guardrails as well to know how deep you can dig without really uprooting the plant, if you will.

[00:45:21] Rhonda: Correct. Right. It’s teaching you how to give them that sunshine and then give them the rain. It gives them the vitamins. Gives them the things to grow, not to uproot.

[00:45:32] Lisa: I love hearing Rhonda share about it because she’s such a visionary and so inspiring. I’m like in the moment. What do I need to survive this year teaching my kid? The beauty of WriteShop– I don’t know. Can I share my screen one more time?

[00:45:50] Gretchen: Sure, absolutely.

[00:45:52] Lisa: Because I have the schedule. I wanted to show parents the schedule for the year because that’s the first thing I look for in a curriculum for my student is, can I do this in a year? Do they have a plan laid out for me? Because if I can just follow the plan, I can check that off my mom list. Like, okay, I did that right. I followed the plan. The way that the curriculum lays out how you can do this in a year or how you can do it in a semester, if need be, or how you can do it longer. What I like is that when I’m looking for a curriculum, the first is, can I do this?

I want to encourage parents– That is basically the gist. I was just going to show them there’s a first semester and a second semester. I print that out for my students. I put it in a page protector for them and then they put it in the front of their notebook. That way, if they ever get lost, Mom can go back to that rubric and find her framework of this is what they did in class. This is what they turned into the teacher. This is what the assignment is. This is the time I have to grade it. That’s the first thing I look for in a curriculum, is can I do this? I would encourage parents to have grace with yourself because you need to find something that works for you.

That said, the second thing that I’m looking for is a curriculum that talks me through what to do. As a parent, if I can figure it out from the student manual, I feel a lot better about it. If I have to go back and forth between the teacher guide a lot, it can be challenging. If I can follow the instructions in the student workbook, then I know I’ll be able to get my student to follow them.

The first thing is the curriculum laid out for me, but the second thing is can I follow along with this? Those are two of the most important things for me when I’m choosing a curriculum. The third thing that I love about this, especially for the age group that it is, I want it to be as fun and engaging as possible because if it’s not engaging, it doesn’t matter what skill I’m trying to teach. I have a daughter that’s in Rhonda’s literature classes, and my daughter comes home so passionate about the latest book that she’s read in her class.

She had just read Frankenstein, and we went to a college show day because she’s a senior in high school, and the president of the honors college happened to be an English professor. She said, “I’m going to give you honors students a mini-lesson today on Frankenstein.” Aislyn was the only kid in this little arena area who had read Frankenstein. She just put her on the spot and said, “Aislyn, would you tell us about the book? Just tell us what it’s about so everybody in here knows.” She just gave a lovely description of the important things, the themes in Frankenstein, like all of this stuff. This honors college dean is looking at her like, “Holy cow.” I could see in her face she was like, “We want that kid.”

We were there for a preview day, but Aislyn has been accepted. This honors college dean adored her because she knew all about Frankenstein. At the end of Aislyn’s explanation, she was like, “Well, I’m going to show you my slides now, but I think Aislyn has pretty much covered the themes and this stuff and that stuff.” That’s what I love about WriteShop is that it makes– The hard thing, the scary thing writing, it makes it engaging. My three things are a good curriculum, I can follow it, and it’s engaging.

[00:49:45] Rhonda: One more word of encouragement to parents. You do know that in the teacher guide, there is even a page that says positive and encouraging comments. There’s an entire list. They’re not fake, they’re really thoughtful types of comments. That’s so useful because I remember what it feels like to be in the ditches digging hard, working with your kids, and sometimes you just feel dry as a bone. I feel like there’s even refreshment for parents in here that you can look and see.

[00:50:20] Gretchen: Those of you who have joined us live today, you understand why when Rhonda just mentioned in passing that she had experience with this program, I had to reach out and say, “Oh, please come talk to me more about this.” You have encouraged me today phenomenally, and I know this will encourage everyone who gets the opportunity to watch and listen. This was an experience here where you would have been well served if you’d watched the webinar.

If you’ve listened to us on the podcast and you’re going, “Well, what were they referring to?” the cool part is everything that Lisa has talked about, it might not be the same lesson, but you can see it in the WriteShop sample lesson online. In the WriteShop I lesson, you will be able to see everything that Lisa has referred to. That’s going to make it a more valuable experience for you.

Ladies, I can’t begin to say thank you enough. This was such a terrific experience. I’m so happy to have spent the last hour with you all. I look forward to hearing from you all again soon. Take care, everyone. Thanks for joining us this afternoon. We’re really glad to be able to have the opportunity to come into your living room. Take care.

[00:51:35] Voice-Over: Thanks again for joining us. We’re glad to be a part of your educational community. You can help us grow our community even more by rating, reviewing, and subscribing to the show wherever you may be hearing this. Don’t forget that you can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. We’ll see you again next time. Until then, keep building strong foundations for lifelong learning.

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