Homeschool day 24 of 180
Yesterday afternoon, before we went to our Wednesday evening bible study, Kelly wrote something in preparation for her book. It was very, very good. We have talked about how J.R.R. Tolkien spent many years preparing to write his books. He wrote a history of the Middle Earth, developed the characters, and even invented languages and their alphabets before he ever started to write the stories themselves. To that end, Kelly wrote a few paragraphs about the characters she has imagined for her story. I have said it before. She has a wonderful voice. She wrote about a small incident to get a feel for her characters and how they interact. It was good enough that it could even make it into the story. The point, though, was to develop her characters and start building a file on each of them. She is off to a great start.
As the teacher, I need to think of some ways to help her make the writing process creative, effective, and efficient. Tonight, we need to set aside some file space for notes, story ideas, manuscripts, character descriptions, etc., etc. Even though I think it is a bad idea to spend a whole lot of time on the computer, I think this might be a case where the computer would be the best technology for the job. Writing is easier to edit and archive on the computer and Kelly types faster than she can write by hand. I will make the rule that all the writing needs to be on the downstairs computer on OpenOffice.org Writer. Maybe Santa Claus will be able to afford a new small laptop for writing and homeschool tasks that we can keep downstairs. On the other hand, a bigger monitor would be nice for upstairs, too.