As a former English major I have spent 8 years of homeschooling looking for a writing curriculum that works the way I want it to with my children. I've tried numerous programs and had been disappointed with them all until I found IEW. It has fulfilled all my personal requirements. It's broken down into easy-to-follow, logical steps - it's very concrete. It teaches simple outlining and note-taking first, a key skill in mental organization and preparing a coherent written work. Then it progressively teaches the student to use their outlines to construct a well-written paper, one paragraph at a time. By having very specific goals to achieve it matches the mental process of writing - taking abstract ideas and making them into a concrete written work.
I had always thought that writing should be learned, not in isolation as a
separate subject, but in the course of using it to do actual writing about
topics that interest the child. IEW is designed to be incorporated with other
school subjects, particularly history, science and literature. Our family is
mainly using it with our world history studies this year. Each child is assigned
to a particular person or event from a history unit and writes about it at his
or her own level. The younger children are practicing their writing skills by
making "key word" outlines of paragraphs I have selected for them from
their history texts (A Child's History of the World by Hillyer is a particularly
helpful resource for this) and then orally narrating them to me or an older
sibling. My older children are writing longer summaries from their outlines and
learning the various writing "dress-ups" to add to their compositions
to improve the style of their writing. The goal for each child is to gradually
achieve writing independence, choosing the source texts for their writing and
then composing a well-written essay, critique or narrative.
Since I'm using this program with seven children at once, five of my own and two from
another family, I have found it helpful to make a checklist of skills for each
child. I went through the IEW syllabus and wrote down the skills to be taught
including 1) types of writing (note taking and outlines, summarizing from notes,
summarizing a reference, library research reports, essay writing, summarizing
narrative stories, writing from pictures, creative writing, critiques); and each
individual stylistic technique: Dress-Ups (clauses, adjectives, verbs, etc.),
Sentence Openers (prepositional, clausal, etc.), Decorations (questions,
alliteration, similes and metaphors, etc.), and Sentence Styles (each form of repetition).
I teach these elements one at a time to each child, or group of children, as they
are ready. When they have mastered a skill I check it off on their individual
checklist so that I know what they've done, what to grade them on, and what to
introduce them to next. It only takes a few minutes of my time once or twice a
week to get them started on a new element of writing and each child can progress
at his own pace. This is the first writing program that all my children have
enjoyed using, in fact I often hear them make comments such as, "This is
really fun!" They view it almost as a game and I have seen an immediate
improvement in their writing abilities and in their willingness to write.
