“Excuse me, Athena. That sounds like a school activity, and the point of summer is that children are off school. Why would I want to inflict more compositions on my kids during their vacation?”

Thank you for that question! There are two main reasons homeschool parents may wish to require summer writing from their students.

1. Some homeschool students NEED the extra practice.

As Danielle pointed out in her “Summer Scaries” blog post, low-pressure, non-graded writing activities over the summer can help some students maintain their writing muscles. In some cases, these muscles atrophy over vacation, and students begin the next year having forgotten all they ever learned about composition.

Requiring summer writing not only provides homeschool students with practice, but it also demonstrates that writing is not exclusively an academic activity. Breaking that mental boundary may be the breakthrough your student needs to write well and freely.

(Check out Danielle’s blog post! Solid encouragement for homeschool parents entering the summer months.)

2. Some homeschool students WANT the extra practice.

Some of you may be blessed with a student who LOVES writing, and you should encourage that kind of expression and development! While these students may dive into writing on their own, a little guidance may benefit them—especially younger students.

With these two groups in mind, let’s dive into summer writing ideas! While I encourage you to develop your own ideas and prompts, here are some suggestions to get started.

(Check out the EIW textbooks for guidance about how to approach each of these compositions.)

Summer Writing Prompts

Expository Writing

Think about topics the student will want to write about or things you want them to think about. Writing about these important topics will help them put thoughts and/or feelings into words, which benefits their personal development and not just their academic performance.

Try some of these prompts:

• What kind of person do you want to be? Write a paragraph explaining at least two positive traits you want to see in yourself and why you want them.
• A goal is an idea that someone puts into action. What is one of your goals? Write a paragraph explaining what your goal is and how you plan to accomplish that goal.
• What is one of your favorite memories? Describe the memory and explain why you like it.

Journal Writing

Journaling is a way to record events, but it can also develop self-awareness. Writing journal entries will help students realize they can write for themselves, not just a teacher.

Here are some ideas for journal entries:

• Keep a daily journal of a trip you take this summer. Write 3-4 sentences about whatever you want to record about each day.

(Tip: When I was in elementary school, my mother purchased daily planners as “journals” for my sister and me. The planners provided a limited amount of space for each daily entry, which made the task seem less intimidating than endless empty pages.)

• Describe three things you want to do or be when you are a grown-up.
• Write a journal entry about ten of your favorite things, including items, activities, and foods.

Narrative Writing

Writing stories—original or reimagined—is a great way to foster imagination in homeschool students. Narrative writing can be entertaining and freeing, for there’s no right way to tell a story!

Let your student’s imagination run wild! But in case they need it, here are some suggested prompts:

• Is there a book, movie, or video game that has an ending you don’t like? How could the story have ended better? Rewrite the ending in the way you think is best.
• Write your own version of a fairy tale. Maybe Cinderella doesn’t want to go to the ball, but to the ball game! Maybe Puss in Boots isn’t just a clever cat, but a shapeshifter! Maybe St. George doesn’t want to kill the dragon, but learn to ride it! Rewrite a fairy tale in your own way.
• If you could go on a dream vacation this summer, where would you go? Write a narrative of your vacation—where you would go, who you would be with, and what you would do.

May these few writing ideas inspire you to come up with your own specialized prompts! Summer writing is a chance to shirk off the restrictions of academic prompts, which by necessity are general and impersonal. However, with summer writing, you can get personal with your kids!

For example, if I were coming up with summer prompts for my 13-year-old homeschooled brother, I would include:

• Write a paragraph explaining the best way to take care of the dozen baby chickens we just purchased.
• Journal about how you felt after seeing Avengers: Endgame on opening night.
• Imagine what it will be like to interview at the Lego Company when you are old enough. Write the story of that interview and how you get the job.

Happy summer, everyone! And happy writing

By Athena Lester
Head of Curriculum and Scoring

In my opinion, the summer scaries are a legitimate concern, especially since students learn and retain that knowledge in different ways. Are these subjects like riding a bike? Will all the knowledge rush back as soon as the homeschool student picks up a pencil or opens a Word document? Should a summer break simply be abolished so the student never goes too long without at least some practice?

Your homeschooling schedule is entirely up to you, and I’m not here to suggest that either taking a break or schooling throughout the year is somehow superior to the alternative. Instead, what I want to do is provide some suggestions for banishing the summer scaries as we enter the warmer months of 2019, particularly as they apply to writing.

1. Save a writing assessment for the beginning of the next school year.

The assessments included in the Essentials in Writing curriculum, especially the comprehensive assessments, are wonderful tools for gauging your student’s progress immediately after learning and applying new concepts. However, they can also be used as an indicator of what your student may need to review before the next EIW level. You and your student can then make a list of specific concepts and then keep a close eye on these concepts over the next school year.

2. Provide writing “assignments” over the summer that are fun.

Assignments? Over the summer? I can already see you shaking your head or rolling your eyes at my naivete, but hear me out. Writing, as you and your student have hopefully discovered by now, is more than essays and papers—it also includes narratives, letters, lists, and pretty much anything you can imagine that can be written down. Encourage your student to write a letter to a friend, pen an imaginative narrative about a fantastic adventure, or create a list of places they’d like to visit over the summer. Bonus: these writings won’t be graded by you or scored by any rubric, so their creativity is limited only by their own imagination.

3. Don’t worry about it—at all.

You read that right! Writing may be a daunting subject, but part of what makes Essentials in Writing so effective is the time spent reviewing and reminding the student of what they already know before introducing brand-new concepts. For example, if Mr. Stephens is introducing the imperative sentence to students in a level, he’ll make sure to review the other sentence types—declarative, interrogative, exclamatory—beforehand so that the student knows what to expect and doesn’t feel overwhelmed.

Because of the time and lessons devoted to reviewing the material, you don’t need to worry that your homeschool student will forget everything they learned the previous year. They may need a bit of reminding, and the road may not be perfectly smooth, but over the past year, they learned how to craft a paragraph. They perfected writing hooks and closing sentences. They practiced how to avoid certain sentence errors, and if they don’t immediately remember these strengths, they soon will.

Writing, like many other skills, is not something that can be learned fully and thus fully forgotten. It is practiced, built upon, improved—and because of this, you don’t need to worry that your student will completely forget everything they ever learned about it over a few months. Give them assessments, suggest that they write creatively over the summer, but overall, rest easy and resist the summer scaries. Your student has learned, is learning, and will keep learning how to write—and what they’ve learned isn’t leaving anytime soon.

Danielle Nettleton

Curriculum Editor

Essentials in Writing