Teaching Writing: Genre Lessons for Teaching Writing in the Homeschool High School Classroom and Beyond

Most high schoolers in America operate with basic writing skills at best (U.S. Department of Education, 2012). Students who are educated at home, or homeschoolers, may be only marginally better in their writing skills, if at all. A review of materials available to home educators for the instruction of their homeschool students revealed that available writing curricula does not do a good job covering more than a few basic writing forms, such as research and narrative. This creative project aimed to create writing instruction materials that could be used by home educators to teach their high school students how to write well. In order to create versatile materials that educators can personalize and individualize for their students; genre pedagogy approaches were used. Genre pedagogy considers all texts based on the situation in which they were written, including the purpose of the piece, the audience it was written for, and the context it was written in. Teaching students to be mindful of a text’s genre and situation prepares them to analyze and write in any genre form. As such, the materials created for this creative project informs educators on the basic principles of genre pedagogy, provides a step-by-step process for creating a writing unit based on genre pedagogies, and offers three writing units that familiarize students with the writing situation as well as the process of analyzing a text’s genre. The resulting materials are flexible and will aid home educators in their instruction of writing. Finally, conclusions were drawn about the need for more robust writing curricula, particularly for home educators and recommendations were made for further research where the literature review showed a distinct lack of materials

Identifying Scholarly Information

This video explains what makes a source “scholarly,” how these sources differ from more popular information, and how to identify scholarly characteristics. You can contact a librarian to request customized content for your classes. A librarian will respond to refine the content and format of your requested materials within one to two business days

Supporting Your Topic with Scholarly Sources

This tutorial is designed to help students deal with difficult and specific research. It looks at how to work specific articles into a basic research project, even when the article is more specific than your topic. You can contact a librarian to request customized content for your classes. A librarian will respond to refine the content and format of your requested materials within one to two business days