If you have been in the homeschool community for any amount of time, chances are good that you have at least heard of the Institute for Excellence in Writing® (or IEW® for short) and their writing curriculum. We were so blessed to receive their Structure and Style® for Students Year 1 Level B (grades 6-8) to use in our own homeschool!
D and C with their binders.
C (8th grade) and D (6th grade) will be using this program throughout this school year. A, B and D have all participated in IEW through our weekly homeschool CoOp in the past. A and D have taken 1 year, while B has taken 2 years. C has never taken an IEW writing course so this will be his first time using the program.
What's included in this course? Our physical kit contained a teacher's manual, a student packet and binder, and a card with a unique code for forever digital streaming video instruction.
Our physical kit
Inside the student binder are tabs so everything in the student packet gets organized as you progress on throughout the year.
C and D's student binders
What is IEW® and how does their writing program work? This program uses a unique approach by providing structure for students to learn. The goal is to help students build confidence in their writing while also moving towards more independence and creativity in their own writing. The nine structural models used are note taking, writing paragraphs, stories, simple reports, writing from pictures, research reports, creating writing, essays, and critiques. These models will give students the tools to organize any type of composition they may come across. I personally love the stylistic techniques that students learn incrementally to help develop more sophisticated writing - these include strong verbs, quality adjectives, sentence openers, various clauses and more!
This course is divided into 24 weeks and is easy to use. I say this because I feel like most people are intimidated by writing programs and teaching writing but IEW is user friendly and is organized extremely well. They have put the work into this program and it shows!
You guys know I love a good Scope and Sequence. Above is the first page. It tells you which week each stylistic technique will be introduced as you can see that the -ly adverb appears in week 2 and the who/which clause appears in week 3. I really appreciate the literature suggestions as well.
D and C with the 1st literature book suggestion, The Twenty-One Balloons
Above you can see the lesson overview for Unit 1, Week 1
You can see that students will watch the 1st video this week broken into two parts. Students will write about their home and save their paper for the last week of the program (it's a before and after type experiment). They will write a KWO, or key word outline, from a few sources with the class (on the video). And they will tell about that source from their KWO.
The video dashboard is easy to navigate as you just select the video you need.
Andrew Pudewa is the instructional teacher on the videos. He is funny and super easy to relate to. Above, you can see him walking students through the process of creating their first KWO.
A KWO example with the Source Text
Our Fix It! Grammar Book 2 Set
I really like that the Structure and Style daily schedule includes the Fix It! Grammar program as well.
I mentioned that I'm using this Level with C and D. I also went ahead and purchased Level C (which is in post production) to use with A and B this year for high school as well. I'm hoping to receive it at the end of this month. If it's not obvious, I'm a huge IEW® fan! If you are looking for a well rounded writing curriculum for your students, I cannot think of a program that I would recommend more.
You can engage with IEW® on social media @:
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