Dear Laurena,

It is Saturday afternoon and I am planning my lessons for the coming week for my two 8th graders. Another homeschool mom and I started talking a couple of years ago about how we would like our kids to learn debating skills. It has stayed in the back of my mind that I want my kids to learn how to logically arrange their thoughts to make a good verbal argument on a topic. I have been using Charlotte Mason’s “narration” method of assessing my students’ grasp of concepts for several years, but was not satisfied with simply using question and answers. When I varied by asking my children, “Just tell me about Mother Jones’ work with railroad unions,” they were unsure how to mentally organize all of the information they knew on the spot in order to give me a logical speech on the topic. I wanted to train them how to prepare a well-organized speech.

You might be surprised to hear that I have been using your Write By Number program to achieve this verbal goal. Using your program the way it is intended, I have required my two kids to daily read a couple of pages (outlining a paragraph type or sentence structure) in the textbook, and then to type a paragraph using the new skill. I have assigned various topics from other subjects across the curriculum about which to write daily. I assign something like, “Use Sentence Pattern #18 to write a Variation C paragraph about Hernan Cortez.”

For the last couple of months, I have been using your program in a way that you probably did not intend. I have continued assigning daily paragraphs, but have stopped asking questions during Narration Time. I simply assign them a topic and ask that they organize their narration to me like they would write a paragraph for “WB#,” as we call it. They stand with confidence in front of me and give speeches using 1232323 paragraphs, feeling confident in the organization of their knowledge. (Just like with any discipline, to know and understand the boundaries is comforting, so to know how to order their speech -begin with a topic sentence, introduce three sentences and supporting sentences, then a conclusion- gives them confidence that they can do the assignment well.)

Having the structure of an outline in their heads seems to also eliminate “ums” and “uhs” since they can sense where they are going in the story. Also, mentally following the discipline of writing intentionally and paying attention to grammar, their narration has very few slang expressions or nervous phrases (“you know,” “anyway”)…

I just thought that you might like to hear of another use for your excellent program. As I’ve said before, the logic and organization WORKS to give students confidence!