Over at the Homeschool Buyers' Co-op (free membership required to participate):
The One Year Adventure Novel is currently available at a 20% discount. The more families opt in for this group buy, the greater the savings.
Amicus will be using this very cool-looking, rave-reviewed program for the writing component of his coursework this year: it looks to me like the perfect way to learn about structure in writing, about pushing your writing beyond the limits of the terse informative paragraph, about how your written voice sounds to other people, about creating and sustaining a long-term project. A kid who navigated this curriculum would, in my view, have prepared himself beyond adequately to adapt his writing to the structures and constraints and conventions of more formal writing later on.
Anyway (and no, this isn't a paid endorsement or formal review -- having requested and been impressed by the free demo, I just want to buy this product for the best price possible), I'm joining this buy-in and thought someone else out there might be interested as well.
Offer expires July 31, so don't dawdle!
Also . . .
Big savings on Rosetta Stone languages
A year's subscription to Defined STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) at 60% off
Discounts at Bethlehem Books . . .
and more.
Check 'er out.
5 comments:
My 9th grader last year used OYAN. She enjoyed it and learned a lot--not only about writing but about reading. However, it has a flaw that handicaps the student in our experience: it doesn't allow anywhere near enough time at the beginning for the student to think through what the general setting of the story will be. It's hard for a teenager to come up with a situation that has enough complexity to drive an adventurous plot without being wildly improbable.
Hmm, something to talk through on our own, maybe. In general, though, I was thinking exactly what you said -- that a student would be a far more astute reader, having had this writing experience. I was thinking today how interesting it would be to come off a year of adventure-novel writing to read The Iliad, for example, and examine that through the lens of the adventure story
Ooh, yes!
The astute reading has come out not only with adventure stories but also in Jane Austen and in teen fiction. This daughter babysits for the editor of a teen book review and gets leftover advance copies (sounds almost oxymoronic, doesn't it?). Writing for OYAN, she said, has helped her realize how bad most of it is.
I bet. And in general, of course, understanding literature as something *made*, because you've made some yourself, takes discussion of literature to a more sophisticated level -- you can see how something is put together, and how those decisions on the part of the author, even if you can't know why the author decided to do X instead of Y or Z, shape the way the story (or the poem) means. Or why they're stupid decisions, and different ones might have made a better story.
I wish this had been around, or I'd known about it, sooner -- my now-graduate would have loved it, though on the other hand, it's the kind of thing she sort of did on her own anyway. One of the best writing experiences she ever had was drafting a play, revising it with the help of her drama teacher, and then staging it. Very much the same process (and it also took about a school year from start to finish), and the mentoring relationship helped her keep it going and get it out of her own head and onto the stage.
So my son's really looking forward to OYAN. It'll be interesting to see what he does with it.
"understanding literature as something *made*, because you've made some yourself"
You know, I think one of my favorite unintended effects of homeschooling is that my kids seem to have a greater than average understanding of many things as *made* because they've made some themselves. Literature, music, theology, and also food and clean laundry.
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