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How to Teach Writing in Homeschool: The Process Most Moms Are Missing
If your child hates writing — or you dread teaching it — you’re in good company. Writing is one of the most common pain points homeschool moms bring up in mentoring sessions, and it’s not because the kids are lazy or the moms aren’t trying hard enough. It’s because most of us were never actually taught how the writing process works. We were handed a topic, told to write a paper, and graded on the result. No wonder we feel lost trying to teach it to our own children.
In this episode, homeschool expert Christy-Faith — author of Homeschool Rising and a 20+ year educator who taught writing in graduate school and ran one of the country’s top private learning centers — sits down with veteran teacher and BJU Press curriculum specialist Sharon Fisher to walk through the four-stage writing process homeschool moms have been missing. Sharon has presented teaching workshops nationally and internationally, and she’s the curriculum specialist Christy-Faith calls when she wants to talk shop. Together, they break down where parents go wrong, why writing is a process and not an event, and the one mistake that quietly kills your child’s voice every time you sit down to write.
Why Writing Feels So Hard to Teach in Homeschool
Sharon Fisher opens with a confession many of us share: she didn’t really learn the writing process until she was teaching it. Most of us went through school doing very little writing, then arrived at college expected to produce papers we’d never been shown how to build. That gap leaves homeschool moms feeling like they have to invent something they were never taught — while also worrying their child will face the same shock she did.
Christy-Faith’s take: teaching writing the way most schools approach it — assigning a topic, getting it back, grading it — leaves both teacher and student exhausted. There are too many decisions, too many skills firing at once, and no scaffolding. The fix isn’t a cuter Pinterest printout. It’s a systematic process that breaks the work into manageable chunks across multiple days.
Writing Is a Process, Not an Event
This is the mindset shift Sharon teaches in workshops across the country, and it’s the price of admission for everything else in the episode. Writing isn’t something that happens in a single sitting at the kitchen table. It’s a multi-stage process that unfolds across days — and sometimes weeks — with distinct steps: planning, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading. When you treat writing like an event, you compress all of those skills into one frustrating session and end up with a product nobody is happy with. When you treat it like a process, you give your child time to think, room to make mistakes in the right places, and a sense of ownership over the final piece.
Sharon’s practical rule of thumb: a single writing project should take roughly two weeks. Plan one day. Draft another. Revise. Edit. Proofread. Publish. The pacing alone changes the entire emotional landscape of writing in your homeschool.
The Brain Dump: How to Protect Your Child’s Voice
Christy-Faith shares an emotional moment from her own homeschool: her youngest was drafting a paragraph about her favorite place — the library — and Christy-Faith caught herself wanting to jump in with all the “good ideas” she had about why the library was great. She made herself stay quiet. The stakes, she explains, are higher than parents realize. When we step in during the brainstorming phase, we rob our kids of the delight of their own ideas — and we rob them of the final draft being genuinely theirs.
The technique Sharon teaches is the brain dump: get every idea on paper, even the off-topic ones, with zero filtering. For young children, the parent often does the writing while the child talks. For older kids, a graphic organizer keeps the planning visual. The key rule from both teachers: do not correct spelling, do not fix grammar, do not push your better-formed adult ideas into your child’s planning stage. Praise the ideas. Capture them. The editing happens much later.
Stop “Smooshing” the Stages Together
Christy-Faith calls this one out as a hot take, but Sharon agrees: parents quietly sabotage their kids’ writing by mashing the stages together. The most common version is correcting spelling during drafting. Your child’s brain is moving fast, ideas are pouring out, and right in the middle you stop them to fix a misspelled word. The flow dies. The reluctant writer gets even more reluctant. Sharon’s instruction is direct: write “no” at the top of your notebook and never correct spelling, grammar, or anything else while your child is in drafting mode.
Each stage of the writing process needs its own moment. Planning is conversational. Drafting is creative. Revising is structural. Editing is technical. Proofreading is the final polish. Compress them, and you sabotage all of them. Separate them, and the work becomes manageable for your child and for you.
The Critical Difference Between Revising and Editing
Sharon flags this as one of the most common mistakes homeschool moms make: combining revising and editing into one step. They are two different jobs. Revising is about clarity and logic — does this paragraph actually communicate what my child meant? Are the steps in the right order? Is anything missing? Editing is about grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. If you edit before you revise, every grammar fix you make gets thrown out the moment your child decides to rewrite a paragraph or add a new section. You’ve wasted both of your time.
The correct order matters: revise first, edit second, proofread third. Sharon points out that even professional writers work this way. The piece has to say what you mean before it’s worth fixing the commas.
Skills-Based Writing vs. Content-Completion Writing
Christy-Faith pulls out one more reframe that lands hard: stop measuring your homeschool writing by whether you finished the curriculum, and start measuring it by whether your child grew. If you treat writing as content to plow through, you’ll rush past the moments where actual learning happens. Two or three really good writing projects in a year — fully planned, drafted, revised, edited, and shared with the family — will produce a stronger writer than ten projects rushed for completion.
Sharon affirms this with a structural insight: writing curriculum should use a spiral approach. Letters, opinion pieces, narratives, poetry, book reports, argumentative essays — kids need exposure to all the genres across the years, with each genre revisited and deepened over time. That’s how skills build. Hammering one form for weeks while ignoring the rest produces narrow writers; rotating through genres with intentional skill-building produces flexible ones.
Why Read-Alouds Are Writing Instruction
One of Sharon’s most quietly powerful points lands near the end of the conversation. Kids learn to write by hearing excellent writing. Read-alouds aren’t a separate subject from composition — they’re a foundational input. The literature you read aloud, the vocabulary your child encounters, the figurative language they hear, the rhythm of well-built sentences: all of it becomes the raw material their own writing draws from. Christy-Faith adds her usual encouragement to read aloud above grade level when your child can still follow it. The bigger the literary diet, the stronger the eventual writer.
⭐ New to Homeschooling? Start with Episode 101 — the New Homeschooler Series is the best place to begin.
Resources Mentioned
- BJU Press Homeschool Writing Curriculum — Sharon’s recommended writing program with built-in graphic organizers and a step-by-step process
- HomeWorks by Precept — Sharon Fisher’s company; trusted provider of homeschool materials
- The Christy-Faith List — Find homeschool-friendly businesses and providers
- Thrive Homeschool Community — Christy-Faith’s membership community for homeschool moms
📚 Looking for more free resources? Find all of Christy-Faith’s freebies — including Curriculum Recommendations, Homeschool Style Finder, and Sample Schedules — on the freebies hub.
Related Episodes
If this episode resonated with you, you’ll also want to listen to:
- The Power of Reading Aloud — Why reading aloud above grade level builds stronger writers, readers, and thinkers Listen here
- How to Choose Homeschool Curriculum Without Losing Your Mind — Christy-Faith walks through the framework she uses for every subject decision Listen here
- Deschooling: What It Is and Why It Matters — The mindset shift every new homeschool family needs Listen here
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does my child hate writing?
According to Christy-Faith — homeschool expert and 20+ year educator who has taught writing since graduate school — most kids who hate writing aren’t bad at it. They’ve been asked to do five jobs at once: think of ideas, organize them, get them on paper, spell every word correctly, and use perfect grammar — all in one sitting. The fix is breaking writing into manageable stages across multiple days. When the work becomes possible, the resistance fades.
What is the writing process and why does it matter?
The writing process has four to five distinct stages — planning, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading — and each one has its own job. Christy-Faith and guest Sharon Fisher, BJU Press curriculum specialist, explain that homeschool moms who treat writing as a single event compress all of these stages into one frustrating session. Spreading the process across roughly two weeks per project gives kids the room to think, create, and improve without burning out.
Should I correct my child’s spelling while they’re drafting?
No — and Christy-Faith and Sharon Fisher are emphatic about this. Correcting spelling during the drafting stage interrupts your child’s creative flow and trains them to associate writing with criticism. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation belong in the editing and proofreading stages, which come much later in the process. During drafting, the only job is getting ideas on paper.
What’s the difference between revising and editing?
Sharon Fisher, who has taught the writing process to elementary students for years and authored writing materials for BJU Press, explains that revising is about clarity and logic — checking whether the piece communicates what your child meant — while editing is about grammar, punctuation, and mechanics. The order matters: revise first, then edit. Editing before revising means every grammar correction you make may get thrown out when the structure changes.
What’s the best writing curriculum for homeschoolers?
Christy-Faith — author of Homeschool Rising and a writing teacher since her early twenties — names BJU Press Homeschool’s writing curriculum as the strongest she has used. She points to its scaffolded breakdown of the writing process, its built-in graphic organizers, and its variety of writing genres across the year as the features that make kids want to share their finished work, not just complete it.
About Our Guest
Sharon Fisher is a wife, mother, and grandmother passionate about helping homeschool parents and Christian educators teach with excellence and a biblical worldview. She holds a B.S. and an M.A. in Elementary Education and brings years of full-time elementary classroom experience plus her work as a former elementary author for BJU Press, where she contributed to a range of educational materials. Sharon presents teaching workshops nationally and internationally, and currently serves as the Social Media Coordinator, Workshop Speaker and Coordinator, Blog Writer, and Curriculum Specialist for HomeWorks by Precept — a trusted provider of homeschool materials.
About Christy-Faith
Christy-Faith is a homeschool expert, author, speaker, and the host of The Christy-Faith Show — the podcast for homeschool moms who take their craft seriously. With over 20 years of experience in education, a master’s degree, and a background founding and directing one of the country’s top private learning centers, Christy-Faith has advised everyone from everyday families to A-list celebrities and billionaires on their children’s education. She is the author of Homeschool Rising: Shattering Myths, Finding Courage, and Opting Out of the School System, the founder of the Thrive Homeschool Community, and the creator of the Christy-Faith List — a free directory of homeschool-friendly businesses and providers. A homeschool mom of four, she reaches over 400,000 followers across social media and has built one of the largest and most trusted voices in the homeschool movement.
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