This is our catalog of courses. We will occasionally adjust the course listing to reflect the addition of new courses and the retirement of others.
Master the details of writing that you need to succeed — and perfect the essential tools necessary for excellent high school writing, including clear sentence and paragraph construction, summary and paraphrase, answering essay questions, linear & process writing, advanced paragraph structure, and more. Take the 9-4 course with this course to gain a full semester’s credit of writing!
Total classes: 6
Prerequisite: Required: Registered for High School Writing Essentials 1: Essential Punctuation & Grammar I (HS 9-1) and High School Simplified Writing 1: Strong Foundational Writing Skills (HS 9-2). Courses build on one another, and students will need to know the content of the 9-1 and 9-2 courses to succeed. The prerequisite can be taken either LIVE or through Unlimited Access (recorded course). An alternative to the prerequisite: a passing assessment from the Aquinas Writing Advantage Assessment service, https://homeschoolconnectionsonline.com/writing-evaluations.
Suggested grade level: 9th grade; however, all students are welcome
Suggested credit: ½ semester Writing or English. Combine with High School Simplified Writing 2: Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay (HS 9-4) for a full semester credit.
Description
Join this essential writing course for all high school students, to make sure that your student has critical high school essay writing foundations in place. Give your high school student exactly what’s needed for writing well-crafted sentences and paragraphs—including the absolute “must-have” knowledge, review, and practice for the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and prepositional phrases, and compound sentence structures. Learn to use transitions and connectives to make your paragraphs smooth; the use of quoted material to support your ideas; and the use of summary and paraphrase that’s required in all academic writing. Even if your student has learned foundational concepts before, the approach in his class is to use high school vocabulary and structures that are more complex and needed for upper-level writing. From mastering the details that are holding your student back to providing much-needed practice, help your student perfect the essential tools for high school writing with this course.
Outline
Class 1: Using strong nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in well-constructed sentences
Class 2: Perfecting higher-level capitalization, punctuation, and the use of quotation marks in dialogue in academic writing
Class 3: Perfecting linear writing, transitions, and connectives in sentence and paragraph writing
Class 4: Writing with summary and paraphrase
Class 5: Answering essay questions: structure, form, and content I
Class 6: Answering essay questions: structure, form, and content II
Materials and Homework
Course Materials: All materials are provided free with this course. Microsoft Word or the ability to convert a document to a Word-compatible document is required. If you do not own Microsoft Word, you can use a system such as Google Docs that converts to Word documents FREE.
Homework: Estimated three to five hours per week for homework outside of class time, depending on the student’s ability. Writing assignments graded by the instructor.
