Episode 198: Help! My Kid Hates Writing with Jule Bogart
For the Busy Mommas…
Links from This Episode
There are a few books we recommend to brand new homeschoolers, and our guest today wrote one of them!
She's a mother of 5 (now grown) kids, homeschool OG, and brilliant mind who's helped thousands of moms shape their homeschools.
She's just added another book called (Help! My Kid Hates Writing!) to her list of publications, curriculums, and accomplishments, and we feel uniquely blessed to have her here with us today!
Julie's Wisdom for Brand New Homeschool Moms (01:20)
Julie’s been thinking about what to tell new homeschool moms obsessively for the last few months now…because homeschooling feels like it’s changing.
When Julie started, before the internet, homeschoolers really felt like they could do it. Today, it seems like homeschoolers don’t know if they can do it.
Today, there seem to be more co-ops and less moms doing the day-to-day themselves.
Britt feels like there are so many choices and so much information, including social media, and moms are feeling inadequate.
Julie grew up in California with a unique public school experience, and by the time she had her own children, that wasn’t available in public schools.
Adult women who were raised in traditional schools (with standards and outcome-based education) seem to feel so much more pressure, like one wrong move can harm a child’s future forever.
My experience with newer homeschool moms is the old belief that “I could never do that.”
Julie would say, You’re going to reinvent homeschooling every year you do it, there’s never a year that’s the same as the previous one, you’ll think…oh I should have had it mastered by now…but how could you—your kids just went up a year in age—it’s the first time you’ve ever taught the oldest kids that age, and weirdly, the younger kids who come up to that age don’t want to do it the same way, so you literally never have the pleasure of what a school teacher has…which is the 5th year teaching 5th grade, now I know what I’m doing. Homeschool never feels that way.
So, for homeschooling to be successful, there are two things you need…
You need to have a desire to be a learner, not a teacher. It’s a family culture of learning, and you’re in a learning seat.
You have to be willing, over and over, to experiment. And that means failing, because experiments mostly fail. In one year, if you string together 12-15 amazing learning moments in 10 months…you’re doing pretty good!
The First Step of the Journey to Fluent Writing (10:45)
When Julie first started creating curricula for her company, she began (like everyone does), with the paragraph. And she was bored.
As she thought about the developmental stages of writing, it became clear there were 5 categories that children move through, and it’s purely her observation (you won’t see it in anyone else’s work). They are…
Verbal (Jot It Down). The foundation of writing is what we say; it’s the words in our minds that we manage to externalize. When you don’t have writing skills, you need a secretary (usually a parent). This first stage is when you establish for your child that the thoughts your child has in their head that are unique to them deserve to be captured on paper and read to an interested audience. The entire foundation of writing is built on this.
When your children realize that the thoughts that live inside of them deserve to be read, then they know what you want when you say, “Please write.”
With Chat GPT so available to everyone, it has even become a crisis in Elementary school (not just college).
When your kids start telling you something that matters to them, stop what you’re doing, grab a pen and start writing down what they’re saying (without telling them what you’re doing). Later, take it out and read it at the dinner table.
The good news is you can start anytime.
One night Julie’s daughter brought her a story from her younger sister.
From Referee to Coach (18:55)
Being a referee is what many mothers tend to do naturally.
Ask your kids to read their work to you first, so you hear the content. One problem for adults is that everything we read is professionally copyedited.
The second stage of writing development is…
The Adult + The Student Partner Together (Partnership Writing). The adult and the student partner together to create writing. Think about traditional sports, and athletes like LeBron James. He didn’t become a star because he mastered the rules book; he became great because he had actual aptitude in the skills of the game, and the person who could help him develop those skills was a coach, not the ref. When we’re looking at a child’s writing, we can start with the content, and then work with the child to correct the spelling a few days later (help them to see what doesn’t feel or look right so that they can fix their work).
This bodes well for moms of many, who can’t simply imagine how they will sit with every single child for every single lesson, but when you start with Jot It Down and move to Partnership Writing, you’re building an independent Learner. This is something that develops over time because it wasn’t yours in the first place.
This is a training ground for you and the kids, and Julie’s learned through the families who take her classes that the idea of coaching has extended far beyond writing.
Julie’s goal has never been for anyone to fall in love with writing; it has always been that they can face the blank page without feeling intimidated.
When the flashing cursor is all you see, or the blank page is in front of you, that’s the most intimidating part of writing.
Once you have words, it’s like playing with Legos; you just move the words around.
The issue isn’t whether you love or hate writing, it’s if you can use it. Does it serve you? Does it create the opportunity for you to record and protect your thoughts for readers?
Awesome Adulting (32:00)
When you have kids, especially in the early years, the survival of these little humans is paramount. Then, there’s a point at which you need to care less — you need to start a learning journey of your own.
We need something that reminds us we made it to adulthood. It can be anything from grad school to tending ornamentals, having a garden in your backyard, to bird watching, to knitting, to being great at cooking, to writing articles on a blog, to having a part-time job, Jule even had a friend who worked in a bio lab after hours.
We need something, because otherwise our kids pick up the energy that our adult achievement is them, and that’s too much pressure.
We can’t let our kids be the verdict on whether we led a successful adulthood; we are responsible to our children, but we aren’t really responsible for them. They are making decisions, they will have regrets, and this is a normal part of growing.
This is why the next stage of writing is…
Building Confidence (The Stop and Start Part of Life). This is when we hop in the passenger seat (much like driving instruction), and they’re starting to feel what it’s like to have the controls in their hands.
While your kids are building confidence, you need other problems to solve that don’t involve your children; it will really help your mental health.
The biggest gift you can give your kids is knowing that what they have to think is unique and valuable. Once a child knows that, formats are easy to learn.
Our chief job as a mother and a homeschooler is to support, encourage, grow their confidence, and their goodness—to raise whole kids—instead of just smart kids, and it’s a huge weight off us.
Julie also called out one very important point…why are we so worried about teaching our kids the difference between an em and an en dash…and we don’t know it (and we’re fully functioning adults)!
The Chicago Manual of Style is 1,000 pages, and next year they’ll put out a new edition, and things will change. So what we really want is adequate awareness of punctuation, and that is controlled by the author, not some outside entity.
You can decide if you want an em-dash, a semicolon, a period, or a capital letter. You can decide if you don’t want to use any capital letters because that’s important to you for whatever reason in this piece. You can decide that you want everything to be perfect, and you’ll hire a copy editor because it’s going to be published and it matters.
Writing for an audience of one whose only job is to find fault is demoralizing.
Kids love writing! When the internet threw open its doors, the first people through the doors were homeschoolers and kids.
Julie's Criteria for Good Writing (49:00)
Julie’s one criteria for good writing is…
Do I want to keep reading?
So, you don’t have to be better at teaching writing. You just need to get out of the way more, celebrate more, be present more, trust the process more, and you can’t mess it up…learn as you go.
Research shows that if you’ve suffered a traumatic event and you write about it for four days in a row, it’s better than therapy.
A's to Our Q's (50:54)
Julie’s favorite back-up meal when her kids were younger comes from the More with Less Cookbook, and it’s Curried Lentils with Rice, and they’d put toppings on it (inexpensive, sustainable, and can feed a crowd).
The family’s favorite form of communication is a group chat on WhatsApp, and her kids have their own sibling chat on Signal.
Julie’s personal favorite writing exercise has been freewriting, and more recently, Julie read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Letters from Love (which has been therapeutic). She’s also using Poem Crazy from Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, and has really enjoyed the exercises.
Currently, Julie is reading four books…Everything is Tuberculosis, The Siren’s Call, a book by a Swedish researcher, and Emily Henry’s Book Lovers.
