How To Teach Writing In Your Homeschool Without A Curriculum

Are you homeschooling a reluctant writer? Mastering writing takes lots of practice and it can be challenging for kids. Engaging in meaningful writing activities can make it more fun to practice writing skills and encourage your child to write more often.

Consistency is vital when you’re teaching writing, but it’s hard to be consistent when writing brings tears and frustration for your homeschooler. Besides that, many homeschool writing curricula and books are dry and boring for kids.

Fortunately, we don’t need a writing textbook or curriculum to teach this important skill to our homeschoolers. Are you ready to discover how we teach writing without a curriculum? This interest-led approach has inspired creativity, fun, confidence, and a love of writing in our daughter and I can’t wait to share it with you!

Writing In Our Homeschool

Writing in our homeschool used to be a struggle. Emily hated it and I was convinced we just had to keep going. I knew our current writing curriculum wasn’t working, but I wasn’t sure what to try instead or what to do next.

What do you do when you feel like you’ve tried everything and your homeschooler still dreads writing? That’s where we were with our writing curriculum. It didn’t matter what I tried, it became a battle of wills that ended in tears and frustration for both of us.

Many of the writing programs we tried seemed pointless, making Emily reluctant to try. Her own perfectionism was also a problem. She sometimes gave up in frustration when she wasn’t satisfied with her own efforts. Ultimately, I had to get creative about how we approached writing in our homeschool.

Traditional writing programs just weren’t working. So, we came up with real-world ways to practice writing skills and fun ideas for learning writing without a curriculum. 

How To Teach Writing Without A Curriculum

So how do you teach writing without a curriculum? I’m going to share our favorite writing tips and resources that worked for us. I hope these writing tools and activities encourage your kids and take the frustration out of writing in your homeschool.

Strewing Writing Resources

Strewing writing resources is one way to garner interest in writing. Begin with fun resources like Rory’s Story Cubes or magnetic poetry. You could also strew fun pens, a really cool journal, or Mad Libs to get your reluctant writer started.

Play Writing Games

Playing writing games is another fun way to teach writing skills without a curriculum. We love teaching this way! 

Gameschooling is a fun way to bring any subject to life, especially concepts your homeschooler doesn’t love. Check out some of our favorite writing games like Create a Story Cards or the Tell Tale Card Game to get started.

Start Journaling 

I started journaling as a form of self-care and it wasn’t long before Emily wanted to join me. These days, we journal independently together and it’s become something I look forward to each week. 

We break out all the beautiful pens and markers to make our journaling experience more fun. Journaling together has helped us to connect with one another and foster a deeper relationship. Plus, it’s a great way to explore writing narratives.

Check out How We Homeschool: Journaling to see how we incorporate this into our homeschool.

Mail Time Monday

Kids love getting mail. On Mondays, we read our letters together and respond to cards from friends. This is when we write letters to pen pals too. It’s one of our favorite activities!

Adopting a pen pal is a great way to encourage your reluctant writer to explore letter writing. There are pen pal programs for homeschoolers you can get involved with or write letters to a distant family member or friend.

Check out How We Homeschool: Mailtime Monday to see how we incorporate this into our homeschool.

Night Zookeeper

If your homeschooler loves video games and hates writing, Night Zookeeper might be the solution for which you’ve been searching. Sometimes game-based writing programs have standards that don’t match your child’s grade level. 

However, the engaging games and challenges in Night Zookeeper will motivate your homeschooler while helping them meet the state standards for writing. We have found that Night Zookeeper is a fun way to increase Emily’s vocabulary, improve her sentence structures, and help her master grammar skills. 

The communal aspect of the games is also great for families like ours who are homeschooling just one child. Plus, she has created some really imaginative fun stories!

Check out Look Inside: Night Zookeeper to see how we incorporate this into our homeschool.

More Ideas For Learning Without A Curriculum

There are so many fun ideas for teaching without a curriculum! From strewing to gameschooling and everything in between, you won’t want to miss these fun interest-led ideas and activities for math, history, science, and language arts. Discover all the fun in these articles:

Learning without a boxed curriculum or textbooks isn’t just possible, it’s engaging and filled with great opportunities for your whole family! Have you been searching for more ways to make writing fun this school year? Share your experiences in the comments, I can’t wait to read them!

One Comment

  1. We listen to a lot of podcasts and one of our favorites is “Story Pirates.” Kids write stories, send them in, and a few of those stories get turned into sketch comedies. It’s fantastic! Listening to these has given my girls something to strive for. They wrote a story to send in, but our cat ate it (seriously!), so we need to work together to rewrite it. But this is something that maybe other families can use to ignite the story-writing fire.

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