How to have fun teaching writing to your middle schooler

Imagine you could create a magazine tailored to your favorite topic.  What would you create?

That’s the concept behind Cover Story writing curriculum. Over the course of a year, you create a magazine covering your favorite topic.

Once the kids hit junior high I knew I needed a bit more structure for their writing curriculum than I was currently using.  Because left to myself I was going to endlessly assign to them short stories and research papers.  I was never going to touch on poetry. I might assign a letter or two, maybe a journal, but realistically it was going to be short stories and research papers.

That is not a well-rounded writing curriculum.

{I bought this on my own, but I have this theory of reviewing all of the curricula we’ve ever used eventually on this blog, there are a few affiliate links in here marked with an *)

Enter Cover Story, a middle school writing curriculum

I’d heard of the creators behind Cover Story before they have a high school curriculum called One Year Adventure Novel, where you guessed it, you write a book in one year. I also knew my kids were not ready for that because their writing skills are not that developed. I was on their site and drooling over their high school curriculum when I saw an image of their junior high writing curriculum and clicked over.

I knew that was what I needed to use this past year.

What Cover Story covers

There are a few different aspects to their writing curriculum

• video lessons covering assigned work (which I love because of their steampunk element)
• daily writing assignments that grow in complexity over the school year (starting with questions you ponder)
• assignments for the magazine you’re going to create

These assignments are what got me interested, because it covers all sorts of topics. You know the assignments I didn’t think to cover on my own? The poetry, letters, and all that? This writing curriculum covers all of it.

So far (we’re taking longer than a year to complete this because we’re doing it as a family), the kids have written a cinquain, limericks (not dirty ones), interviewed someone related to their topic (which was a challenge since Batman chose dwarves as his topic, he interviewed a blacksmith).

I love Cover Story

I love the way the lessons are presented. I love the variety of the lessons, and how more difficult assignments are broken down into several lessons.

I love the student workbook and how it breaks down their assignments even better. It gives useful examples for my kids, and it’s really improved their writing this year.

 

How we modified Cover Story to work for my family

As I mentioned we are completing Cover Story with Jeff, that means we have to all be watching the lessons together, which means we don’t go through the material as quickly as planned, so that’s our first modification.

That means sometimes the kids are stuck in one of the different daily writing assignments for far longer than is intended. To change that, I occasionally change up the assigned daily writing to one of my own choosing.

The other big change I’ve made, we don’t write in the student notebook, or the amazing journal.  That’s because my kids have atrocious handwriting. Well, not Princess, she just writes big.  To make keeping track of stuff easier, it really is better for all involved if I have them write it in a different notebook with bigger lines* (each child had an assigned color for their notebook, however, a certain child named Princess kept losing her notebook, and so had about 5 half used notebooks). Come Christmas I switched them over to typing everything.  That has allowed us to reprint lost assignments, AND had the added benefit of not having the handwriting problem.

Really, it’s a constant struggle.  I now grade their notes in classes based off of their handwriting.

We also, later in the magazine are not being quite as strict about the articles fitting with the chosen magazine. I mentioned Batman chose dwarves as his topic.  He was really struggling with how to write on his chosen topic, and his articles pretty much all revolved around beards and blacksmithing. We actually had to tell him he could not write another article about beards.

Once we lightened up the topic requirements, their writing became less labored.

My one thing I wish was better, I wish they had individual rubrics for each of the assignments, right now I’ve been making them up as I come to the assignment because my kids need a bit more structure to know what I’m looking for.

They’ve got a new junior high/high school curriculum coming out this summer, which I picked up to try next where you’re writing a chrono newspaper, I can’t wait to see what that one is about.

 

Get your own copy of Cover Story

I picked mine up when Homeschool Buyer’s Co-op* had a sale on it, so keep an eye out for that. But if you’re in a time crunch head on over to the  Cover Story website and get your own copy. I personally recommend getting the DVDs because then you always have access to the lessons, but that’s my personal preference for a hard copy over something stored in the cloud. Getting cloud access does cost less as I recall.

Oh, and their customer service is super nice. I may have misplaced my copy of the teacher’s manual, and I spent quite a while saying, “I’ll survive without it,” but finally broke down and asked about ordering a new copy. They got back to me super fast, and gave me a discount because they could see I’d already ordered it before.

In case you’re wondering, the missing teacher’s manual was finally found sitting up on the balcony of our house, a place I tend to sit at during rain storms. It was in surprisingly good shape for having sat up there for a few months, and now I have two copies of the teacher manual. Which is not so helpful.

Some of our past writing assignments (some inspired by Cover Story)