Start with Kidswrite Basic
Nine years ago, I offered Kidswrite Basic as our first online writing course. I was sick of the fact that so many writing manuals expected moms to read them and successfully implement them without any contact with the creator of the manual! What would a mother do when the perfectly clear steps for writing a paragraph were foiled by her 9 year old son’s dysgraphia (struggle to use small motor skills to handwrite)? How could a mother help her child revise that paragraph when the habits of interaction with the mother brought about a meltdown of tears rather than a joyful expansion of creative ideas? And what about that stubborn young writer who suffered from what I call “The Blank Page, Blank Stare” Syndrome? (Hand a child a blank page and you get back a blank stare.) If the child can’t even get the pen to move on the page, all the writing manuals in the world won’t help.
That’s when I realized that what I’d much rather do is create a class where I could model how to nurture and support a context for writing freedom in the home. By working together over a period of weeks, we could explore the dynamics of writing (what is communication? how do we investigate an object or topic for greater insight and vocabulary? how does one access language buried inside and get it to the page without tantrums or anxiety?). I could offer the support to the harried mother who worried that she was failing in her task to produce good writers, and therefore, carried an unnecessary weight of guilt whenever she thought about her role in the facilitation of writing.
The six-week course became the staple of the Brave Writer program. It’s the space where moms “get it” for the first time. They have those “aha” moments when they discover that the way they were taught to write was (on the extreme end) abusive or (on the benign end) merely inadequate. They get to feel the validation and support of an ally in their own teaching (a kind of meta-process where the way the instructors work with mothers is parallel to how mothers will then in turn work with their children).
As you encounter writing obstacles with your kids during the course, a trained Brave Writer instructor is only a message away from giving you tricks and tips for overcoming the current presenting problem, specifically suited to your child. Each obstacle is taken seriously and is creatively addressed to help you tailor-make your writing program to your particular child’s tastes, needs and skills. As you’re led through this process, a really wonderful development occurs: you and your kids become allies in the writing process, rather than antagonistic opponents. Your relationship deepens and you find yourself satisfied with the rich, creative, personal writing voice that is evolving in your child, right before your eyes. That’s what writing should be about.
So if you wonder how to jump into the Brave Writer whirlpool, start here. Start with Kidswrite Basic. We offer it twice every quarter to be sure that as many moms as possible can take advantage of it. And it is the only class that has a family discount, enabling you to enroll all your children for a reduced rate. We still have spaces for winter quarter.
Read here for details about how our online classes work.
