Brave Writer

• What is Brave Writer?
• Getting Started
• The Brave Writer Program

The Arrow

Target audience:

• 3rd to 6th grades
  (8-11, remedial for 12 year olds)
• Partnership Writing and Faltering Ownership stages of growth (Chapter 14 in The Writer’s Jungle.

It takes approximately 24 hours to activate your year long subscription or your monthly subscription to the Arrow. You will hear from us via email with your login credentials once we’ve created your account.

What is the Arrow?

The Arrow is a monthly digital downloadable product that features copywork and dictation passages from a specific read aloud novel. You may look at (and use!) a sample issue by clicking on the “Download a Sample” button on the right.

It is the indispensable tool for Brave Writer parents who want to teach language arts in a natural, literature-bathed context, using copywork and dictation. It is a language arts resource that equips you, the homeschooling parent, to fulfill your best intentions related to:

• Spelling
• Punctuation
• Grammar
• Literary elements
• Quality living literature

The practices of copywork and dictation teach your children the fundamentals of written communication. These practices naturally facilitate the development of accurate mechanics in the context of quality literature (the best words, in the best style, accurately edited).

The Skinny

• Each month, the Arrow features one classic novel to be read aloud to your children.

• Each week, it features a selected passage from that novel. The passages are accompanied by notes that detail spelling, punctuation, grammar and literary style elements found in the passage. These notes are designed to make it easy to pre-teach the passage (no advanced preparation necessary).

• Each issue also highlights a literary element of the month. These are elements like assonance, alliteration, dialog, onomatopeia, powerful verbs, rhyme and more. Examples of the element are included in the issue and are taken from poetry, other novels or the novel featured in the Arrow.

• Each literary element is accompanied by a writing tip or exercise that gives your kids a chance to play with the element in their own writing. The goal is to help kids notice quality writing and why it is successful. Then they can practice using the element so that eventually, they will naturally incorporate it into their original writing.

Brave Writer is unique on the market because we put such a strong emphasis on Literary Elements. These elements make writing pop. Your kids need to know how to use them in their own writing to be powerful writers (far more than they need to learn formats).

You may subscribe to this school year’s Arrow (new issues published on the 1st of each month), or buy them all at once (Complete Year Subscription for a reduced price) or you might like to buy them ala carte: Already Published Issues.

Scroll to the bottom of this page for a special discount in the month of June 2011!

How do I use it?

You and your child will read the passage out loud to hear the musicality of the language, to notice the correct use of apostrophes or semi-colons, to note new vocabulary and tricky spellings, to pay attention to the grammatical structure or the special dialog punctuation. The Arrow supplies you with notes to help you notice what you might overlook in the passage. The Arrow helps you identify why the writing works and is enjoyable to read, as well as highlighting excellent uses of punctuation or alliteration or description.

After you’ve enjoyed the passage together, your child will either copy it into a copy book attempting to reproduce it exactly, paying close attention to all of the spelling and mechanical demands of the passage (copywork), or you will read the passage to your child and he or she will write it out onto a sheet of paper while listening to you, attempting to remember how to punctuate and spell the passage correctly (dictation). Copywork/dictation done about once a week over several years does more to increase your child’s ability to punctuate and spell correctly than any other practice I’ve ever run across.

The French swear by it and use dictation from Kindergarten all the way through lyceé (high school). I had to take dictation in college when I attended a French university! One other benefit to a steady diet of copywork and dictation is that eventually your kids will be able to take clear notes during lectures in high school and/or college. They will have developed an ear for really listening to the words and writing them quickly as well as accurately. This skill (writing accurately and quickly) is especially valuable in timed essay writing—college admissions tests as well as in-class essay exams.

Consistent copywork/dictation practice allows you, the home educator, to use quality literature to cover the aspects of writing that you care most about without the tedium of workbook sentences isolated from the context of real writing.

How it Works

The Arrow is a digital product only. We post each month’s issue in a private folder for subscribers. When you sign up, you are granted access to the private folder where the Arrow is housed. You may then open the folder, download the current issue and print it. You have a month to access and retrieve your issue of the Arrow. It does not exist in hard copy format.

You can order the ten-issue, year-long subscription to the Arrow for a reduced price (issues cost $7.90 rather than $9.95; though in June, you may purchase the entire year for $69.00). When you do, you have access to all the issues as they are posted throughout the year in that special online folder. What that means for you is that you can come back to the folder in January and re-download September’s issue if you’ve accidentally deleted the file off your computer. A wonderful bonus!

A word about grammar: Brave Writer is adding a more conscious grammar component to the Arrow this year! We will give you specific grammar notes that relate to the passage in order to help you guide your children into a better understanding of how grammar supports and fosters beautiful writing.

We also offer an online grammar workshop in the winter quarter of our online class program for families who would like to explore grammar in a revolutionary way. We work with kids to help them experience the power of grammar, not just memorizing the rules of grammar.

Every subscription to the Arrow includes a Guide that teaches you how to execute copywork and dictation practice, as well as how to modify dictation based on the age and stage of your student. Download a sample Arrow by clicking on the “Download a sample PDF” button in the upper righthand portion of this page.

Be sure to consider pairing The Writer’s Jungle with the Arrow in our Platinum Package for a complete year’s worth of writing instruction. You won’t need anything else AND these two together will cover a range of ages and levels.

2011 - 2012 Arrow Book List

(This new list is available for whole-year purchase now, in June, while the monthly subscription will be available at the end of July. All Writer’s Jungle Platinum orders in June will be subscribed to this new list with the release of the first issue on August 1, 2011.)

The ISBN numbers are only guidelines for locating the book. You are free to use a different edition for your homeschool.

August: The Phantom Tollbooth; Norton Juster
(ISBN-13: 978-0394815008)

Wonderful children’s adventure riddled with plays on words.

September: The Penderwicks; Jeanne Birdsall
(ISBN-13: 978-0440420477)

This enjoyable tale of four sisters, a new friend, and his snooty mother is rollicking fun. (School Library Journal)

October: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon; Grace Linn
(ISBN-13: 978-0316038638)

The enchanting adventure of Minli, whose name means “quick thinking,” living with her desperately poor parents between Fruitless Mountain and the Jade River.

November: Galen and the Gateway to Medicine; Jeanne Bendick
(ISBN-13: 978-1883937751)

The history of the medical researcher, Galen (129 A.D.) written in the same spirit as Archimedes and the Door of Science.

December: Frindle; Andrew Clemens
(ISBN-13: 978-1111111113)

Not quite a trouble-maker, Nick Allen finds ways to “enliven” his 5th grade classroom, culminating in a romp through invented language.

January: The People in Pineapple Place; Anne Lindbergh
(ISBN-13: 978-1567924114)

Feeling alone and friendless in a new town, August Brown discovers a wondrous fantasy street and experiences thrilling adventures with his new playmates. (Publisher’s Weekly)

February: The Liberation of Gabriel King; K. L. Going
(ISBN-13: 978-0142407660)

A tale of race relations between two boys in Georgia during 1976.

March: Danny, Champion of the World; Roald Dahl
(ISBN-13: 978-0142410332)

An intense and beautiful father-son relationship is balanced with sublegal high jinks that will have even the most rigid law-abider rooting them on. (Amazon.com Review)

April: The Long Winter; Laura Ingalls Wilder
(ISBN-13: 978-0060581862)

The most nerve-wracking of the Little House series, the Ingalls family bravely faces a long winter without access to food and supplies.

May: Free Baseball; Sue Corbett
(ISBN-13: 978-0142410806)

The son of a Cuban baseball player (Felix Piloto) lives in Florida alone with his mother. When Felix has the chance to find out about his father, he takes it.

How to Purchase the Arrow

The Arrow can be purchased as a monthly automatic payment starting at the end of July. Sign up using the Paypal button for subscribers on the upper right side of this page. Each individual issue is $9.95.

You may also purchase all ten issues at once for a reduced price: $79.00 for all ten issues.

Use the payment button on the upper righthand side of this webpage to purchase your year long subscription through Paypal.

Or, send a check (made out to Brave Writer LLC) postmarked before June 30 to the following address:

Brave Writer LLC
7723 Tyler’s Place Blvd. Ste. 165
West Chester, OH 45069

Be sure to state that you want the Arrow and include both an email address and phone number.

Refund Policy

The discounted, year long price is a non-refundable subscription. If you aren’t sure whether or not the Arrow is for you, sign up for the monthly subscription at the end of July so that you can cancel if you choose to or download the sample issue so that you may try it out first.

The Brave Writer Program