I am also a big fan of Susan Wise Bauer, the author of Writing With Ease. Her book, "The Well Trained Mind" is the book that convinced me that I could homeschool, in a classical, Christian way, and be truly successful at it!
Writing With Ease is a 4 level program. It uses Classic Children's literature as samples for the parent to read out loud and then use in narration, dictation, and copywork exercises. Bauer's idea is that a child cannot truly become a great writer if they have not seen and read and copied examples of good writing over and over again. She incorporates grammar lessons into her writing as well, a great review technique that has been very helpful to my students.
We've certainly enjoyed finding new gems to read as well. Often times, after a week of samples from a book, my children will be begging me to try and find it at the library. We've read the Little House series because of this, Time Cat, Rascal, biographies of Alexander the Great, The Reluctant Dragon, Alice in Wonderland, and the list could continue indefinitely.
The book contains all of the sample texts, a dialogue script for you to use with your student, and also all of the worksheets that you need for your child's writing. Now that I'm on my 2nd round through the book, I just had to buy the replacement worksheets for Gwangi. The teacher part of the book is still good to go.
A sample from our work this week. We were reading excerpts from "The Reluctant Dragon." In this exercise, we read an excerpt, talked through it for comprehension, and then asked what was one thing he (Gwangi) remembered from the sample. He told me what it was, I wrote it down, and he is now copying it down.
Here is the website to learn more about this program or to buy replacement worksheets - http://www.welltrainedmind.com/store/
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