Learn basic communication skills with this updated
Writing Strands curriculum for a new generation!
This Beginning 1 course was created for students learning to write sentences and paragraphs on their own. The assignments gently guide students through their work each day, helping them master basic writing with unique exercises on dialogue, reporting, interviews, role playing, persuasion, story writing, and organizing and grouping ideas.
Topics addressed in this one-year course include:
- using adjectives to construct sentences
- presenting actions in a logical sequence
- writing conversations using dialogue structure
- describing objects by observing and defining differences.
Includes a suggested daily schedule, worksheets that are three-hole punched and perforated, and a new literature component that helps students look more deeply into biblical passages, as well as other books chosen by their teachers.
Dave Marks, the founder of National Writing Institute and the author of the
Writing Strands and
Reading Strands series of books, graduated from Western Michigan University. He then received a Masters of Arts degree from Central Michigan University and did 45 more hours of graduate work in English at Eastern Michigan University and Michigan State University. Dave retired after 30 years of teaching writing in college, high school, junior high and grade school.
When their son was in the fourth grade, Dave and his wife Lea realized that he was not being given the training they felt he needed and elected to homeschool him in language arts. To prepare him for college writing, they designed a series of lessons, which he completed by the age of twelve. That summer, they enrolled him in freshman English at Lake Michigan College, where he received his first A in college work. He is now a poet and university professor.
Dave and Lea later turned these lessons into the Writing Strands series of books. While Dave never maintained that the series could create poets for other homeschooling parents, he felt that if children worked successfully through the Writing Strands series of books, they would have the skills needed for the challenge of any writing assignment in their undergraduate college work.