Real World Writing In Our Homeschool: Mail Time Monday | Homeschool Writing Without A Curriculum

Hey everybody. Welcome to the wall doc way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be all about real world writing practice in our homeschool. At least once a week I get a message here or on social media or in my inbox asking me what we have used for writing or what we are using for writing. And the answer is probably going to surprise you because it is nothing. Emily is in seventh grade and to date we have never completed in its entirety any writing curriculum at all. We may have dabbled or got inspiration or use things when it ties into a unit study. But as far as actually completing a writing curriculum, we've never done it. And I'm going to be the first to tell you to this point in our homeschool, I don't regret it and I don't think we needed to do it. The thing that we did do, the thing that made the biggest impact, the one thing that we did very, very frequently was mail time Monday. I wanted a way to make writing connect for Emily. I wanted it to be real world. I wanted something that had meaning, not just let's learn how to write a five paragraph essay. I wanted her to just connect with it and learn how to creatively write. Because for me, I feel like if you can creatively write, you can always learn the process of writing later. In fact, this is kind of why I feel that way. I remember learning, um, I think it was MLA writing when I was in high school or regular essay writing. And then in high school they were like, you're going to write MLA style. Then when I took my AA, they're like, you're going to write Chicago style. And then when I went on for my bachelor's, I went into a bachelor's for business and they were like, no, forget all of that because we're going to write completely differently. By the time I graduated, my head felt so jumbled because there was all of these different ways and styles and it was all about how it was composed and my, it just physically took the fun out of writing for me. I didn't enjoy it because I was always being told, no, forget that and do it this way or no do it this way, not that way. And I didn't want that for Emily. I wanted her to enjoy writing. I wanted her to connect with the written word. I wanted her to just love it. And I couldn't think of a better way than mail because what is more fun for a kid than putting an envelope in a mailbox and then hopefully getting one back? Like that is so much fun and you literally get to connect with the written word. And so I was like, that's it. That's what we're going to do. So it started when she was in preschool and it was simply originally her writing thank you letters. Her birthday happens to be the end of July. So our school year started out with her writing thank you letters for her birthday cards and her birthday gifts. And I took blank cards that said thank you on the front and I used a highlighter and I wrote, you know, thank you for my birthday gifts, something super simple. And she would take a pencil and trace over the highlighter. I would stick it in the envelope, I would address it and she would get to go take it to the mailbox and stick it in the mailbox. That is how it started for us because I didn't want her to be sitting there doing 15 and 20 cards at a time. I thought, okay, we'll do three or four once a week so it's not overwhelming. And it just so happened that we started on a Monday. So it kept happening on Monday about the time that we finished all of her birthday. Thank you cards. It was, I believe it was Veterans Day and we have a lot of military members in our family and extended family. So she wanted to say thank you for your service. So we sent out, you know, Veterans Day, thank you for your service cards. The next thing you know, it's Christmas. So we sent out Christmas cards. Then we needed to send thank you cards for the Christmas gifts. And this just kind of naturally happened that first year. So then the second year I thought, okay, this is really, really working. Let's get a couple of pen pals. So she got a couple of pen pals and they would just draw pictures and, you know, ask each other like one question. Like she'd draw a picture of her other cat and she'd say, do you like animals or what's your favorite animal? And you know, they would just exchange pictures and a question here and there and we would sit down every Monday and we would just do that. We would write pen pal letters. As time grew on, by the time she was in first or second grade, she was writing her own cards. She was learning how to address an envelope, you know, how to write a letter properly. And then I thought, okay, we're going to take this up a level. And so we started incorporating subscription letters into our mail time Monday. I subscribed to a bunch of subscription letters and we would sit down and we would read one subscription letter or I would read the subscription letter while she was drawing her card because she would like to do, you know, all these drawings and all of this stuff. And it just continued to progress into this beautiful thing that we have done every week for years now. I keep a list on my phone as well as in a little notebook of birthdays, anniversaries. So if we sit down, she can say, oh, so-and-so's birthday is coming up or so-and-so's anniversary or, you know, Veteran's Day, Halloween. And now she kind of has autonomy over this and she's like, oh, Halloween's coming up. I need to send these people Halloween cards or, oh, I want to send a birthday card here or Mother's Day is coming up. Let me send a card to Nana. So we just sit down for now about an hour to two hours on Monday and she does cards, addresses envelopes, puts the stamps on them. We walk them to the mailbox and it's just become this whole thing that is a huge lesson. And it has been the most instrumental thing that we have ever done in our homeschool when it comes to writing. But this year I decided I wanted to take it up another notch and I just kept racking my brain on how I was going to do that. And I decided I wanted to incorporate technology because let's be honest, technology is the way of the future. And so I decided that once a quarter Emily would do a newsletter. She kind of loves the idea of social media, but we obviously will not allow it. And this way her family and friends could keep up with her in a way that would be like a highlight reel. So like this is what I did over the summer. So we created a newsletter. I made her a template in Canva and she just plugs in whatever pictures and then she types whatever she wants for that last three months. And it worked beautifully. Everybody loved receiving the newsletter. She loved doing it. She felt like she was taking it up a notch. It was kind of grown up and she got a ton of amazing feedback. So I say this to all of you homeschool moms, number one, you don't need the writing curriculum. Number two, you can start something super simple and it can grow with you and it can change and it can become this beautiful thing that you've done in your homeschool for years. And you get to keep these as memories. But don't like, don't overlook the little things like a thank you letter counting as writing or something that can evolve into a newsletter and don't overlook them. They totally count. Sometimes it means more to your child, to you and to the people receiving it. And it will, it will like submit better in Emily's free time. She writes stories and they're amazing, like really, really good. And I'm telling you, we never did any kind of formal writing. It's because she connected with the written word and she loves the written word. If you would like to get a link to our newsletter template, I have created a blank template that's just like where you could drag your own pictures and type your own stuff. I'm going to leave the link in the description box down below for how you can do all of that in case you want to start your own newsletter. If you start it, I would love it if you would tag us because Emily and I would love to see them. And then also I'm going to leave a link to a couple of blog posts about how to teach writing without curriculum in case you want some more tips and tricks, but I will leave you with this. The best thing that you can do to expose your child to the written word is read aloud. The more reading that you expose them to, the better their writing will be. And the other thing that we have really, really enjoyed besides Mail Time Monday, which seriously hands down has been like the number one thing that we have done in our homeschool for writing has been journaling, which is something we added about two, maybe three years ago. And it is just the simple practice of Emily and I sitting down together. We print out pictures with our sprocket and we just write, you know, some little things that are going on, simple, nothing fancy. Do you practice real world writing in your homeschool? If so, I would love it if you would tell me down in the comments how you do that with your child.