Nancy I. Sanders is a bestselling and award-winning children’s author and the creator of the WriteShop curricula for elementary students. I recently had the privilege of asking Nancy some questions about reading, writing, and the resources she’s designed that can help homeschooling parents teach their children.
Q: You’re the author of more than 100 books for children, including many that could be added to a homeschooling curriculum. Some are collections of mini-books geared towards beginning and emergent readers. Could you tell us more about them?
A: I always write with homeschoolers in mind. My two sisters homeschooled their children and our son married a homeschooled gal! And I especially love writing material to help parents teach their little ones to read. My series of One Sentence Storybooks: Bible Favorites, Bible Heroes, and Bible Animals each come as a boxed set of 10 mini-books per set. These full-color stories use repetition, word-to-illustration matching, and the fresh new approach of telling an entire story in just one sentence to help even the youngest readers learn to decode words successfully and with confidence. It’s so exciting to see parents posting reviews about how their three, four, and five-year-olds are reading these books all by themselves! Some of my favorite testimonies have been when parents share that they “caught” their son or daughter reading these books to a baby brother or sister!
Read some of these reviews as well as download free reading-based printables and activity ideas here.
Q: I love the WriteShop writing curriculum, and we use it at our homeschooling co-op. You wrote the WriteShop Primary and Junior series for elementary students. How does this curriculum help parents teach their children to write?
A: That is so wonderful that you’re using this curriculum! I’m so glad you’ve “caught the vision” and are finding this a helpful resource in your co-op.
I believe in making learning fun. When we can get kids excited and motivated, they’ll engage and they’ll learn. When I wrote WriteShop Primary and WriteShop Junior I combined actual steps I take in my own career as a children’s writer along with delightfully fun games and activities I used with my own sons to help them learn. The result? Kids have so much fun they don’t even realize they’re learning or doing assignments. But the biggest plus is that they discover the joy of writing.
Find out more about Nancy, WriteShop Primary, and WriteShop Jr.!
Photo by: Writeshop
