Teaching writing can be a daunting experience. Instilling the necessity and relevance of writing in our children can be even more daunting. I have discovered a few things that, in our homeschool, are crucial to getting my 11-year-old son to recognize the relevance and importance of writing. Perhaps they can help you.

While we started out the academic year with a journal and the expectation that he was to write in his journal on a consistent basis, I have since realized that that would not be in my son's best interest. He still is encouraged to write on a regular basis, but the journal itself is not daily, sometimes not even weekly. Rather, he's in the process of learning to turn to his journal when he's feeling particularly strong emotions, especially anger. As a result, he's learning to express himself via this journal, instead of by stomping off or slamming doors. He's learning that his journal is a good space for him to explore the chaotic feelings growing often brings.

One of the hardest things for me to learn is that his journal must be off limits to anybody except my son, especially his parents. As a result, our son feels safe to write anything he feels the need to write without fear of our reading it. The focus of his writing, then, becomes his release of and working through his powerful, sometimes overwhelming, emotions and not on whether or not he may hurt us or anger us. In essence, his journal writing has become a very inexpensive therapy that's helping him to negotiate his way through the very rocky terrain of adolescence. Plus, whether he realizes it or not, he's developing the necessary skill of reflexive thinking, that is, he's beginning to recognize the association between his feelings and why/how he came about these feelings. And, perhaps more importantly, he's developing the language for describing, analyzing and evaluating this association and these feelings.

A third crucial realization that I have made that's central to fostering writing in my 11-year-old is the notion of authenticity. By authenticity, I mean that in order for writing to be relevant to him, he must realize that writing has a genuine, real-world purpose and audience. By engaging in such authentic writing, he, the writer, is expected to engage in a dialogue with his audience. In other words, relevant writing is not the simple by-product of an assigned descriptive, analytical or any other genre-type essay that is not grounded in genuine purpose and audience.

In the past when I "assigned" a descriptive short paper, my son balked. Frankly, I took umbrage because I had been trained to teach writing and literature. (I have several degrees, a few of them advanced, in English, literature, and sociology, and I have extensive experience working in university writing labs and teaching composition and literature. I also have extensive coursework and research hours in a Ph.D. program.) I finally realized I had to put aside my ego and really pay attention to what my son needed-not what I expected. I realized that simply writing a descriptive (or persuasive or analytic or narrative) essay was, in essence, busy work for him now. After much trial and error, we both stumbled upon the notion of authenticity within the homeschool. Now, because of my training as a university instructor, I was well aware of various writing theories and methodologies, but these always applied to large groups of students. Our homeschool is tiny-one student. Thus, I had to essentially scrap all the years of my training and start afresh.

Homeschoolers are presented with wonderful opportunities for authentic writing-penpals for example. In order to avoid resorting to the typical writing assignments of letters to favorite authors, room descriptions, different points-of-view essays, etc, I discovered finding opportunities (in addition to letters to penpals and relatives) for my son to write authentically was posing quite a challenge. But, we have found a few.

The most successful source for authentic writing for us, right now, is what I call "spiral logging." It's called such because my son prefers to write in those single-subject spiral-bound notebooks. His "logging" comes from his increasing amounts of writing that he's generating in his current research project.

He has been researching pirates for the past month or so, and, when reminded that he has the responsibility to share his knowledge, he decided to construct a board game featuring pirates in the "golden age" of piracy of the mid 17th to 18th centuries. Thus, he's jotting down notes, plans, diagrams, and whatnot all with the very real purpose of creating this marvelously fun-sounding game he's envisioning. Unbeknownst to him, however, is his incredible amount of critical thinking he's undertaking. He's poring through scores of pirate books in order to locate and write the most relevant bits of information of individual pirates, merchants, goods, and shipping routes. He's searching for evidence of historical hurricanes, piracy laws and punishments, and mutinies. He's familiarizing himself with the geography of the Caribbean Sea, its islands, port cities, and inhabitants. All this so his game will be that much more authentic and historically accurate.

While he's not writing the typical essay, he is definitely writing, and he's developing the critical thinking skills that come from intensive writing and research.

Offering your children the space they need for honest reflexive analytical writing and perhaps tweaking writing "assignments" so they're not necessarily the usual paragraph or essay can provide your children with genuine opportunities for authentic writing. That may lead them down the road to becoming not only strong readers but strong writers as well.