Please know that I was given a free copy of Writers in Residence from Apologia Educational Ministries in exchange for my and my daughters’ fair and unbiased review. All opinions are our own.
I want you to meet Emily. Emily is our vivacious and fun thirteen-year-old. She has never met a writing class she liked, which is okay, because I don’t generally use writing curricula in my roadschool.
Another thing you need to know about Emily is that she doesn’t hold back her feelings.
Imagine her enthusiasm (grin) when I handed her Apologia’s new Writers in Residence program and said, “Here, Emily, is a brand spankin’ new writing program for you to use for two months or until the end of time, whichever comes first.”
Duck and run.
Ha ha. Not really. Emily has been an excellent sport about Writers in Residence, and why not? The program is great!
Here’s what we like about it:
The program includes top notch writing samples from writers you will (or should at least pretend to) recognize. This capitalizes on the excellent tactic of learning through the imitation of quality work…no junk.
Interviews from real Christian authors (not real like me, Emily’s mom, but real like someone that you might know or could at least Google) offer a solid, encouraging nudge with a taste of how-I-got-started reality. This guidance from “real” writers goes further than some of the inane things we parents say, like, “That’s great. Let’s send it to Grandma because our fridge is full,” or “Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming,” which is my all-time most annoying thing I say when my kids get stuck on something. Lame, I know.
The program tackles grammar as well as writing. A good writer (and anyone else who learns to talk ever) needs excellent grammar skills. While we don’t study grammar formally in our household in the early years, I’m totally comfortable with my seventh-grader working through a grammar program, if only so she can see over and over and over again that, look at that, my mother was right. (Someone’s on her high grammar horse today!)
The writing aspect touches on several main components of the writing process within the six units of volume I; volume II is in the works. Click here for more details.
The student portion of the course is contained in a single spiral-bound text that the child can write in. (My kids love writing directly in their workbooks, but I always find consumables to be a drawback. As a single-income music missionary family with eight kids, I usually buy only non-consumable products so they can be passed down. Still, this is a great program, and I do recommend a student book for each student, especially if they don’t like writing. Just bite that bullet if you can.)
I like that the program is conversational and student-directed, so Emily can be pretty self-sufficient. That gives me more time to work on other things, like perfecting my omelet-making skills, which is my current craze.
It is already broken up into a four-day schedule. Emily doesn’t follow it exactly as written, but life is like that. Some days your dad says, “Hey, let’s go hiking in the Grand Canyon,” and your writing class has to wait.
For parents who aren’t comfortable with writing process, the answer key offers all the guidance you need for scoring and evaluating.
Here’s what I like best about it:
Emily likes it. ‘Nuf said.
Additional thoughts for my fellow roadschoolers:
The entire program is encompassed within these two books. (One for us–I’m a writer by trade and training, so I don’t use the answer key.) Naturally, your child will want a pencil, because writing in blood is unwise. Otherwise, that’s it–no internet connection, no binders full of pages that tear out and get caught in the slide, no DVDs the baby uses for speed crawling. (Tell me your RV living is like this, too…please…even if you have to lie just a little bit.)
For the value of this program, the space it takes up is minimal.
On the other hand, spiral binding and I are not friends. When something in our lives is moving from trailer to van to church to trailer to dropped down the steps into the mud to forgot to stow and it launched through the air down a bumpy California road, well, you want the sturdiest book you can find, and that usually means hard cover.
Still, it is ideal for a student workbook, and ours has held up remarkably well, although we’ve only had it for six weeks. Normally after six weeks, the cat has spewed a hairball on it and the binding is compromised and the baby has chewed on the corner (not where the cat spewed) and a page or several are missing. So Apologia gets an extra cookie for that!
Honestly, it’s worth the space it will take up. This is another program we’ll continue to use after the review period has ended.
Go here to read reviews from homeschoolers who fall a little closer to “normal” on the normalcy spectrum than we do:
