Welcome to our student written issue of The Daily Key Photo by fauxels from Pexels

Homeschooling students ring in spring

March 11, 2022

Students are our most valuable asset. This winter, nine homeschool students from Rhode Island took a Magazine Writing and Publishing class led by The Daily Key editor, Danielle Rose. Together, these RI homeschoolers write about spring. Aged 8 to 14, they worked together and created a theme for their mini-issue: Spring. Scheduled ahead of The Daily Key’s spring issue, RENEWAL, the student articles turned out to be more than timely. Not only that, but each student worked independently week-to-week to produce a spring-themed article on at topic that represented their personal interests.

The writing process

The students learned the five-paragraph-essay format of writing. This format is same one taught in the Mind Key Online Writing Course. Not all students wrote five paragraphs, but that wasn’t the necessary element to the work. Instead, the point was to create a rough outline with a topic sentence, a thesis sentence and body paragraphs that reflect the thesis. We called it the hamburger method (coined by a student’s mother as she worked with her daughters after class): Your introduction and conclusion are the bread, the body paragraphs are your filling.

Then we took this sandwich idea and narrowed it down to work with the body paragraphs. Each body paragraph started and ended with a topic sentence, too: the bread. Then we had a few sentences of “cheese” between the bread to make a triple decker, grilled cheese hamburger-sandwich. By the end of class we were all starving (good news, is the class ends just in time for lunch!).

Because the class was magazine writing and publishing, we then gathered images to accompany our articles. The students spent some time finding images that worked well with their articles. They also found keywords and pulled them out for their editor/publisher to use. During the last class, we looked over what it takes to turn an article from a piece of writing into a beautiful piece of online work.

RI homeschoolers write about spring

The students reviewed each others work during each Zoom-based class. We read from our articles, talked about great sources, and encouraged each other in the chat. It was a joy to work with each of them, and I couldn’t be more proud.

The quality of the work speaks for itself, but I’ll let you decide what you think. Remember, many of these students are young, and just learning to write expository-style work. Yet, I guarantee you’ll learn something new as you read. Whether about jumping spiders, spring mating rituals, how Pokemon characters relate to the natural world, or what it takes to train your dog, I learned something I never knew as I explored each article.

What I love most about the experience is that in a sea of “fun” virtual offerings, these students not only stuck with this class to the end, but decided to have an extra session, too. In this class, we reviewed the magazine and had a party. We’ll brought snacks to nosh on while virtually thumbing through the edition together.

What will you nosh on as you settle in click through the links below? Let us know! We hope that you will enjoy these articles as much as we did.