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Simple Creative Writing Course for your Homeschool
Thank you, TOS Review Crew, for giving my family a chance to review the Creative Writing workbook, Sparkling Bits of Writing Book 1 from Creative Word Studio!
Creative writing. Just the words tend to thrill some and stir up visions of nightmares in others.
Where do you stand on creative writing? Are you a lover or a hater of the subject?
My daughter, Sarah, falls under the love category. She absolutely loved our review of Sparkling Bits of Writing Book 1!
I didn’t have to fight Sarah to do these writing lessons, like I have with other writing curriculum. She was always eager to do these lessons.
What Does the Book Consist of?
Creative Writing is a soft-cover, spiral-bound workbook with 150 pages that your student can write right in.
There are seventy-five lessons. Each lesson is short and sweet. It gets right to the point.
The lessons are made up of free writing, reading responses, and mini writing exercises.
Free Writing
The idea of free writing is simply to get your student writing. They are free to basically write whatever comes to mind. For those who tend to freeze up at the thought of coming up with something to write about, no worries! The free writing lessons come with writing prompts, pictures, poems, and/or questions to get your student thinking.
This section encourages you to time your student’s writing. They actually tell the students to write things like, What shall I write next, what shall I write next, what shall I write next, when they can’t think of something to write.
Just keep that writing flowing!
Reading Responses
Reading responses is all about critical thinking skills. In this section, your student is required to study, dissect, and analyze other people’s writings.
This isn’t as difficult as one might think.
Creative writing creates lessons that help your student to get those creative juices flowing.
For example, lesson #29 has Louisa May Alcott’s poem, A Little Bird I Am written out for your student to read. Under the poem are five questions to help your student analyze this poem.
Mini Writing Exercises
The Mini Writing Exercises gives your students an opportunity to put their English skill knowledge to work. Some of these lessons encourage your students to work together with classmates. Since Sarah is homeschooled and doesn’t have classmates, she just continued with the lesson on her own.
Gold Pieces
Some of the Creative Writing exercises have a star at the top of the page symbolizing this lesson is a Gold Piece lesson.
When the students sees this star, they know they must do their very best work. This Creative Writing assignment is expected to be completely polished work and ready for the teacher to grade appropriately.
The back cover of this workbook has a Rubric For Grading Gold Pieces guideline. This guideline gives you, as the teacher, an exact list of things to look for in both your student and their writing assignment. It tells you how many points your student should earn per category too.
For example: Your students attitude and effort could score as high as 20 points. Following directions earns up to 10 points. Punctuation, spelling, grammar, penmanship, creativity, and actually doing the writing assignment each get an allotted amount of points in order to help you give your student a fair grade in Creative Writing.
10 Writing Tips
The back cover also gives ten writing tips towards captivating Creative Writing. This includes things like, using concrete nouns and specific verbs Adding in alliteration, similes, and metaphors. Your students are encouraged to cut down on pronouns and red flag words. They are also pointed towards using resource books, like a good dictionary and thesaurus.
It was interesting and fun to do these creative writing lessons. ~Sarah~
TOS Review Crew
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