KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments through microschooling. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
Episode 80: Help! My Kid Hates Writing. A Conversation with Julie Bogart.
We challenge the grading mindset that squeezes the life out of young writers and replace it with coaching, curiosity, and real audiences. Julie Bogart shares practical steps—jot-it-down, family freewrites, reader response, playful revision, and a kind mechanics mop-up—that help kids find their voice.
• treating writing as self-expression first, transcription second
• separating ideas from mechanics and using scribing or voice-to-text
• shifting from evaluation to allyship and coaching
• creating real audiences to replace single-grader assignments
• using jot-it-down to “publish” kids’ spoken words
• family freewrites to build fluency and confidence
• reader response that guides without wounding
• playful revision that builds flexibility and voice
• gentle mechanics mop-up with student choice and intent
• releasing parent performance pressure and trusting development
About our guest
Julie Bogart is known for her common sense writing, critical thinking and home education advice. Julie’s the creator of the award-winning, innovative online writing program called Brave Writer serving 191 countries and hundreds of thousands of families. She is the author of Help! My Kid Hates Writing, The Brave Learner and Raising Critical Thinkers.
Her Substack, podcast, and social media are wildly popular sources of support to weary, well-intentioned parents. Julie home educated her five children who are now adults and she has three grandchildren.
Connect with Julie
Brave Writer
Substack
Podcast
@Julie Bogart
Got a story to share or question you want us to answer? Send us a message!
About the podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
Got a burning question?
We're all ears! If you have a question or topic you'd love our hosts to tackle, please send it to podcast@prenda.com. Let's dive into the conversation together!
Important links:
• Connect with us on social
• Get our free literacy curriculum
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Because when they obey the language ticker tape in their minds and they follow their sophisticated vocabulary, the complex sentence structure, their use of irony, their senses of humor, that stuff is hard to punctuate. It's hard to spell. So when they take this brave risk of putting out their best ideas, and someone comes along and is like, but you're missing a comma because it's misspelled, they literally learn to dumb down their content to get an A.
SPEAKER_02:Hi, and welcome to the Kindle Podcast. I'm Katie Broadbent, your host, and today we're gonna talk to Julie Bogart, who is one of my absolute favorite people. And I'm so excited to share this conversation with you because you are gonna be so inspired and just feel so much more confident and excited to tackle writing with your students or kids. And I am so excited to share all of Julie's knowledge and her wisdom and her love for students and for families and for parents and for educators. It was truly an incredible conversation and so excited to share with you. Before we jump in, I'm gonna share a little bit about Julie's, just so you know where she's coming from. Julie Bogart is known for her common sense writing, critical thinking, and home education advice. She's the creator of the award-winning innovative online writing program called Brave Writer, which serves 191 countries and hundreds of thousands of families. She's the author of Help, My Kid Hates Writing, The Brave Learner, and Raising Critical Thinkers, all amazing books that everyone needs to read. Her Substack podcasts and social media are widely popular sources of support to weary, well-intentioned parents. She's home and educated her five children who are now adults, and she has three grandchildren. So let's get to our conversation with Julie. Julie Bogart, welcome to the Kindled Podcast. We're so happy to have you on today. It's such a treat to be here. Thanks, Katie. So I want to get started by helping our audience understand where you're coming from. Who are you? Tell us your story. How did you get to be doing what you're doing? And what is kind of like your big why or the change you're seeking to make in the world?
SPEAKER_00:Oh my gosh, great questions. So I'm a mother of five adult kids, and I became interested in homeschooling before I even knew what it was, or was married, or had children. I was introduced to a friend of my soon-to-be husband, and he asked me if I was going to homeschool my kids. And I was like, home what? Like I'd never heard those two words together. This was 1984. And he proceeded to talk about this idea that you could tailor-make the education of your individual kids. And ironically, I had a really great public school experience. I was raised in the 1960s and 70s, before No Child Left Behind. My teachers were all like ex-Peace Corps, you know, first generation Peace Corps hippie types. My school was in Malibu Canyon. So they were really creative. Like my memories of school are being in the creek and doing nature study, doing an archaeological dig, having a renaissance fair for the entire seventh grade. Like there was this true investment in learning that was both kinesthetic and imaginative. And I really loved that. But by the time I was in college, I went to UCLA, I worked as an assistant to a teacher in a junior high. And all of that was gone. Like this was the 1980s, and it just seemed like everybody was doing what we call dittoes. They're like worksheets that were mimeographed in the old fashioned. Yeah, purple ink. There was a lot of sitting at desks and performing to standards. And so when I heard this pitch for homeschool, ironically, my thought was, then I can give my kids the kind of education I got in public school, which is a backwards way of thinking about it. But for me, it made a lot of sense. By the time I had kids, I was already a freelance writer. I worked in magazines and editing and ghostwriting at the time. And suddenly my peer group was asking these questions of me. How are you teaching your kids to write? And it had never dawned on me that I would need a curriculum because my mother was a professional author. She had written at that point, I don't know, 20 or 30 books. She's gone now, but she wrote over 70 books in her lifetime, taught writing. And I was a writer from the youngest age, six, seven, eight years old. And I just used all of the tools professional writers use to grow as a writer. And so when it was time to teach my kids, that's where my brain went. Like, well, what does Peter Elbow say about writing? What does Pat Schneider say about writing? I got interested in self-expression for writing, not how do I hit all the formats that fourth grade standardized tests require. And we had great success. So when my friends started asking me how to teach writing, it was like this natural response. I found myself suddenly like leading a Sunday school class at church on how to teach writing. Parents and teachers came to this thing. Then I got invited by the California Independent Study Program to give lectures on teaching writing. I'm a history major, not journalism. My work was all freelance and generated by passion. But for some reason, I kind of had this understanding that writing support from an adult needed to be more like an ally and a coach rather than an evaluator. And over the last 25 years, I launched my company in January of 2000 to help parents teach their kids to write. And the number one goal I had was for them to build a really loving, nurturing, supportive relationship through writing, a relationship that didn't see tears, resentment, pain, and frankly, what happens in school abuse, like really harmful instruction in the name of teaching that ends up leaving lasting scars long into adulthood. I want to reverse that. That has been my passion for the last 30 years. And I really want to see schools get out of the business of evaluation and more in the business of support, coaching, and allyship. In fact, if they took more of the approach that a coach does for a volleyball team, they would get so much further with writing than they do with this evaluation strategy.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, almost any time a child writes something, it's corrected. All of it. Yeah. I mean, and then I've read I think maybe most of what you've written. And like I've read, I've read all of the writing things. Like I I love it. I'm I was telling my husband this morning, like, I'm so excited. I get to talk to one of my like educational heroes today and like learn from her. So I'm like so excited to have you. One of the things that you've said that has really like caught me and like like reframed how I've been thinking about writing for Prenda and also for my own kids. And my kids, my oldest has dysgraphia. He struggles a lot with writing. They've done a few different writing programs. They definitely have like a bad taste in their mouth. And even that's even at Prenda where they're not like doing worksheets all day. Like they they are like living the dream educationally, and they still are having are hitting the struggle bus with writing, like haven't figured it out. And a lot of it has to do, like I have this, my son who is 12, and he is very creative. This kid reads at like a 10th grade level. He'll read 500 pages in a week. He like is very into, he's a language kid. He just can't like get it out like through he he has like his motor issues, like you know, getting with the dysgraph. So it's like all of this creativity and this self-expression, all these stories are like bottled in him. And I've wanted so desperately to like unlock that. And so I I guess I'll just kind of tell you his story a little bit so you can know where we're coming from. Like I I discovered your work and started implementing some of the things like just on Saturdays at home. And we started doing free rights, we started playing the games that you suggest. And I hope we'll we'll get to some of those things because they're just so practical and like things you can do right now that are so easy. So we'll get to those. Um yeah, just started kind of like Saturday morning writing club with all my kids, like six years old to 12, or she's actually five, five to twelve. At first, they were like, We're not writing. Like, we all hate writing. I was not like a lot. I was like, okay, well, like just have an open mind. Like this might be a little different. And then after the first few, they were like, Oh, is this writing? Like exactly. And I was like, Yeah, this is writing. And they like I I stopped being the person saying, like, it's writing time. And like they were like, Oh, we we missed writing yesterday. They were like reminding me. Um, and it it was like so amazing to see it, like, took three weeks of like just a different approach and like a different attitude and belief in my heart and mind around writing. And they felt that directly. So talk a little bit about like, I mean, that that's probably a very common story for you in in, you know, helping people through this, but tell some of those stories and like what do you usually see when you what is the reframing that you try to try to make for parents? You know, how is this different? We've talked about like not being an evaluator, but like, what's the other thing that you're supposed to be doing? How do you ally? How do you coach?
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. That is really the heart of my work. And my new book, Help My Kid Hates Writing, is all about that because we tend to focus on the child, but really it has to do with the person who is supporting and growing the writer. You know, imagine if your child was learning to speak. I tell this story, my son was 12 months old and he was sitting in a high chair behind me while I was washing dishes, and he said nana. And I knew he meant banana. So imagine if I had turned around and said, Oh, Noah, nana is the word banana. It's a noun. It goes in a sentence like this I would like a banana. And because it's a request, you need to use the oral format called etiquette. I need to hear you say, I would like a banana, please, right? Like we never do that with speech. We immediately stopped calling bananas bananas for at least a year. We only called them nanas. We tried to get him to eat bananas. I called my mother on the international line to tell her that her grandson is brilliant and said his first word. And then I did what every parent of a new child does. I wrote in his baby book the word nana and dated it. In that moment, I turned him into a published author because my thought was this word is so interesting. I want generations from now to know he uttered it. Writing is self-expression transcribed. That's all it is. And the transcription can happen by the child or the parent, it can be voice to text, it could be a hired secretary. My father, who is a career lawyer, never learned to type until 15 years ago and he's 88 years old. Why? Because he dictated everything to his secretary, his entire adult life. Would we say he wasn't writing? Would we give the credit to the secretary? Would we say that his closing arguments were written by the secretary because she had good spelling and punctuation? Absolutely not. We start with the premise that writing is the expression of a self, it is the internalized person externalized, and we find whatever available transcriptionist we can. And right now that's radically changing because of spell and grammar check, the coming of Chat GPT and other AI tools. So in this moment, it's more important than ever that we put the priority on the unique human mind, the thoughts that belong to our children, because the transcription skills are less important than ever. They've always been not as important as thought, but they're a lot less important now than they've ever been. So the reframe is what's going on inside your child? How do we get that out and preserve it in writing for an interested audience? That's the goal. The goal is to be read. Imagine that you've been asked to do a full-on report on ancient Greece, and you actually get excited about this report. You do all the reading, you do all the preparation, and then you write something to describe what you learned, and there's only one reader, and that reader is gonna grade it. Who wants that? That would be like saying, I'm learning to play soccer, and I'm gonna stand out on this field and try to kick past the goalie for one referee who's just gonna decide whether or not it was a good goal. Like no one would play soccer. That would never be the game. The part that we forget about writing is that it is not a means to an end. Most of us treat writing like this is how we go up a grade, or this is how we go to college, or this is how we get a job. No. There was this huge TikTok raging anger by women, young wives, who discovered their husbands wrote their vows using Chat GPT. Why were they mad? Why do you think they were upset about that?
SPEAKER_02:I would imagine that they perceived that as like not authentically the husband's thought or like feeling. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:The goal of that man, those young men, was to do it right. They had been trained their entire lives that writing has to be done right. It has to meet some standard that's invisible to them. It's out in the air. They're hunting and pecking for the words that live in somebody else's mind and imagination. And so they're facing this really important moment. They don't want to do it wrong. And the wives are like, I just want to hear your heart. I want you to be comfortable enough with how you feel about me that you can put those words out there on your own. And this is what's being lost every single day that we keep on with this very bizarre system of writing instruction that says you write for an audience of one who will tell you that that first draft isn't good enough. And guess what? When you write your first draft, it's the best you can do. If you could write it better, you already would have. So why does someone get to come back and say, well, you should have done it this way? Do you think they willfully held back what they couldn't do? No. It's it's a horrible, horrible system for teaching writing.
SPEAKER_02:That's interesting. It's like our obsession with doing it well has neutered our ability to do it authentically. Like I have real thought. Those husbands had real thoughts and feelings, but because of it, and I it kind of goes back to something you said earlier. Like you said the sentence from the age six or seven, I was a writer. Like you gave yourself that internal like label. Like I was living into me being a writer, right? Those kids, anytime they wrote, they were evaluated and they were shown not a writer, not a writer, not a writer. So then when it's like, hey, now it's time for me to like express myself, but I'm not a writer, what do I do? I'm going to be evaluated. And this is like a very important moment in my life. I don't want to mess this up. So they go to ChatGPT out of honestly, like fear. That's right. But their self-expression would not be sufficient.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. Out of logic. I mean, it's logical. Like if your only experience of writing is repeatedly trying and not hitting the mark, then why would you keep trying? Why not just let a tool do it for you? I mean, it's like using a calculator, right? Like I'm not going to work on my times tables anymore. I have a calculator, that's over. Yeah. I'm not even against chat GPT. In fact, in my new book, I have a whole chapter on it. But what I am, what I do worry about is that adults have misunderstood what writing is. Here's what I want you to know. Kids love writing, they do it all the time. In fact, with the advent of the internet, the dawn of the internet, more human children were writing every day than in the history of humankind. I just want you to let that sink in. When the internet came along, children were like, the main thing I want to do is write. They all got live journals, MySpaces, they joined Facebook, they started discussion groups for their online games. They love writing. Today they make TikToks, that's writing. They make reels, that's writing. They have YouTube channels, that's writing. And we're over here saying, no, it's not writing unless it looks like a report that matches fourth grade standards. By the way, most of the writing that gets A's in school is boring. No one wants to read it. It's terrible writing. I remember one of my friends came to me, her name was Glenda, and she said, Julie, I'm struggling teaching my kids to write. And I know that you're a freelance writer. Can you help me? Now, at the time, my oldest child was in fourth grade, and we had already started doing free writing, kind of like what you described, and I wasn't really struggling teaching it. So I said, Well, what are you using? Because I had no curriculum. I was like, What are you using? I want to see what you're using for writing. So she brings over this navy blue binder. It's three-ring, very ugly. I I think that's important to note that even the binder was awful. I opened it up and there's a sample descriptive paragraph and then an explanation for how to write one. So I read the sample paragraph to myself and I turned to Glenda and I said, Did you read this paragraph? And she said, Yeah. I said, Did you like it? She goes, What do you mean? I said, Well, when you read it, did you think to yourself, shoot, I wish there was a second paragraph? She goes, I can't even remember what it said. And I just closed the book and I said, Why would you use as a model for writing something so unmemorable? You can't even think about, you can't remember what this paragraph said. It held no interest for you. Why would that be a good model for writing? She goes, but isn't it correct? I said, So when you're out in the world looking for things to read, are you looking for correct things? Or are you looking for interesting things? Writing at its core is about compelling a reader to keep reading. Nobody finished a novel and said, you gotta read this book, every comma perfectly placed. I was so touched by the commas. No one finishes and says, nailed the format. That is not what we say when we read. And unfortunately, so many of our kids who are actually really clever, naturally good at using language, get marked down because when they obey the language ticker tape in their minds and they follow their sophisticated vocabulary, the complex sentence structure, their use of irony, their senses of humor, that stuff is hard to punctuate. It's hard to spell. So when they take this brave risk of putting out their best ideas, and someone comes along and is like, but you're missing a comma because it's misspelled, they literally learn to dumb down their content to get an A. It's horrible.
SPEAKER_02:This is the same thing we do to kids in like literature, right? Where it's like, okay, you keep we're we're we're being so progressive and giving you like a choice over what book you're reading. And then, but your goal is to get an A on some comprehension task, right? It's like, so which is the simplest, shortest book, right? The logical choice. And I remember being in high school and thinking, like, oh, well, that one's only 80 pages and that one's 200. Why would I pick that like more advanced, like more challenging read if my goal is to get an A, right? It's like Well, that's right. It's undercurrence and motivation.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. Parents all the time talk about like grades, standards. I taught at the university level and I had a student. Uh, this is a great story. I had a student who didn't want to be in my class for sure. My communication at the beginning of the class was I'm gonna be your favorite teacher because I don't care about grades. So if you want to rewrite your essay five times, you can meet with me five times and we will just keep working on it until it satisfies you and me. Your tests are open note, open book, because it's up to you to care about the material. And I want you to actually read the question and be able to answer it the same way you will after you're out of this class, which is you're gonna go look stuff up. Like, I don't need it stored in your brain. I need to know it how you think about it. What insight do you have about it? Not did you store the information in your brain? That's just irrelevant to me. So the student was pulling like a low B, and he really needed an A to keep his scholarship. So for the midterm, it was open note open book, and he basically didn't do it. He got a D. How do you get a D on an open note open book test? I don't know. He pulled an A on the final, but when I put all of it together, he came out with a B plus. And he met me at my office hours and said that I had not done the correct percentage calculation. He was trying to show me that I he's like, I did the calculation and I knew I only needed a D. And I said, you know, you didn't do the right calculation. This is what's on the syllabus. And he's like, no, you said something different in class. I said, it doesn't matter. This was open note, open book. Like you could have put in effort, but you didn't want to learn. All you wanted was to maintain a GPA, and that's not what I'm about. I don't care about GPA. I told you that at the beginning. This is the difference. When we say to our students that your GPA is tied to your scholarship, and then we grade everything, it's logical that kids in college are using Chat GPT. It's a financial decision at that point. It has nothing to do with learning. My writing sort of mentor, guru, Peter Elbow, he recently died, but we were very close friends. And over the years, he was just a wonderful cheerleader for my work. And one of the things he said to me, he worked at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and led this writing group. And all of his work has been used in freshman composition books across the United States. And one of the things he said to me when he heard that I was in the homeschooling space was he said, Oh my gosh, you finally get to do what I never got to do. And that is teach writing without grades. He said, No matter how many assignments I gave in a classroom that were grade free, the end result always had to be a grade. So it always felt a little bit phony. He said, But you actually get to work on writing with no threat hanging over any child's head. And for homeschoolers, that is absolutely factual. Like, and yet they still think that grades matter. I'm like, yes, they don't. You're at home.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so true. Well, we're really indoctrinated, like as parents, to like look to experts and like that judgment and that expertise is like the end all be all. And it's really, really hard, myself included. Like I live in this alternative education world. Like I've written many, many words about the danger of grades and like how that like you know undercuts motivation and like makes kids makes it logical for kids to not choose learning. To cheat. You know, these grades are printing. All these things. And I still feel this pressure for my kids to like perform and like, you know, I feel this societal judgment, maybe. And I I yeah, can we talk about that since you admitted that? Tell me more.
SPEAKER_00:Tell me more. What is it when you say the word perform? Who are they performing for?
SPEAKER_02:Okay, this is gonna get raw. Ready? I am afraid of other humans' judgment of me and my choices as a parent in the educational world. If I was just sending my kids to public school and they were poor writers, I'd have a person to blame. Like, oh, the schools, oh, their teacher, oh, the classes are too big. Like I'd have like a an easy out that wouldn't be my fault. Because I've completely taken like the reins here and like my kids are in Prenda, I help build Prenda, like I feel like accountable and like, oh, you're doing something weird. Okay, like does weird work? And I'm like, it works, but not by your standard. It's like, it's it's like if you're over here playing soccer, we're playing an entirely different game over here, and you're trying to judge our game by soccer rules. And it's like, well, it doesn't look like soccer to me. Like, you're not getting a lot of goals. I'm like, there's not even a goalie over here. Like, what? It's completely different. But like I can't help you understand that. So then just the little voice inside, it just pops up like, oh, maybe it's not working. Maybe you should put them back in school. Maybe you shouldn't trust yourself. Like all of these things pop up for me. And it still happens all these years later. My kids have, I mean, I've they've never been in traditional school. I've homeschooled, microschooled the whole time, four kids. So it just still happens. No, that's exactly true.
SPEAKER_00:It's real for me. I was running a writing instruction business, right? And uh, two examples of what you're talking about happened to me. One was my daughter decided she saw I was teaching all these online classes, so she thought, well, that would be fun. I want to be in one. So I put her in one. And then I was mortified. I'm like, they're gonna judge me that my daughter's misspelling. So before she was in the class, it didn't bother me at all. The second that she was in a context where I would be judged, suddenly now I am worried about how she looks. And we actually had to have a talk about that once she was an adult. Like she remembered it. She's like, Mom, you kind of got on me a little bit. And this was, of course, I was in my 30s. We're like, you know, or early 40s, like just working these things out. So that's one kind of humorous story about how it even got to me. A second one is I started grad school while I was teaching these classes. And I hadn't written a research paper or an essay since college, and now it's like 20 years later. And the first research paper that I got assigned, I was teaching an essay class online, and I had absolute massive writer's block. I could not even get started because the fear was if I didn't get an A on this research paper, I am a fraud and should not be teaching this class and charging people money for this instruction. And that log jam completely blocked me. The only way out of it at the time is I did two things. And I think these are kind of remarkable. The first one was I told my students, I was like, it just hit me that I am nervous that I'm gonna get a B on this paper, and that means I'm a fraud, and here you're trusting me to prepare you for college. I'm so nervous about this paper. And the way high schoolers do when you trust them with vulnerability, they're like, Mrs. Bougar, you got this, you know. And I said to them, I imagine some of you feel that way about submitting your essays to me. And I just want you to know I know the feeling. So I will, I'm not harsh. I will be walking with you every step of the way. I hold no judgment for you. So that was our bargain. It was really amazing. Then I reached out, oh, and they were saying things to me like, just free write, Mrs. Bogart, like the very advice I'd give them. Then I called my professor and I shared this dilemma with her. And she said something I'll never forget. She said, Julie, the goal of this class isn't writing instruction, it's learning. Just write a paper. She said, Maybe you need to just write 10 pages that you throw away. This is advice I give all the time. And then write the paper. But I'm here to support you in learning. So even if you make a mistake, we're gonna fix it because you're here to learn. And those two things really struck me at the time, the way students were so willing to support me when I was honest, and the way my professor was willing to reframe with me. And of course I did. I wrote 10 pages of crap and then threw it away and then wrote my paper. And I did actually get an A, but by then it mattered so much less. I was suddenly back in the world of writing, the way that I knew it. And so I think we have to be really honest that the peer pressure as adults is as strong as it is for kids. And if we're carrying it, we're transferring it to our children, like I did with my daughter. My youngest daughter, uh, I have five kids. So by the time I got to her, I'd already been through four kids, right? And she decided to go to public high school, which for all four years. And during that first semester, she had some challenges with math, didn't feel as prepared as she thought she should have been, and met with the teacher, got all the way up to grade level within a semester, and got an A. And I was like super proud of that. And I was talking about it. And she stopped me and said these words. She said, Mom, you've never cared about grades. And now that I'm in high school, I need you to keep not caring. So you are not allowed to go on the parent portal. You will not know any of my grades for the rest of my academic life. And I think I'm the only parent who never visited the portal for all four years of high school and never college. I didn't know her GPA. I don't know how she did on a single test. It wasn't until I got to her college graduation that I saw she made the honor roll. I had no idea until I saw the little asterisks. And that was liberating for both of us. And I'm telling you, I think that's the problem. You named it so beautifully. It's this peer pressure, this feeling of being judged that grades already create. And then we we internalize it so deeply and we forget what learning is. What is learning?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. A big part of the backbone of why I think that that peer pressure and societal like stress has persisted is because of grades, largely, but the under the furry underbelly of grades is like the belief that kids should be at a certain place at a certain time. And if they're not, it's a problem. And so when I was reading um your your your writing program, you discuss you talked about, and you'll you'll correct me, I won't quote this correctly, but something like the process of learning how to speak, you know, is like the foundation for learning to write. And that happens between like zero and five or zero and seven or whatever. And then the process of learning how to write happens from the ages of eight to eighteen. And it's like that just like relieved so much stress off of my parent. Because now it's like, hey, my child is nine. They're, you don't have to like carry this huge weight of all of these standards and things that they have to do or should do and but like make them like the story is if you can do these things, you're valuable. And I think we really need to step back from that. It's like the ideas inside of you are valuable no matter how they come out of you. And we want to know them. We want to hear your voice, right? But we we put, we crowd out all of that with how it should be and the you're not enoughs unless kind of vibe that we feel as parents and then we transfer as you're saying to kids. And so just knowing like this is a really long process just allowed me to take a deep breath. And remember like I feel like I was not learning what my kids are supposed to be learning now, like until late high school or college. Like it is so pushed down on them. And I just want to like push back so hard and create the space for them to just be and that's not to say like I don't want them to have strong writing skills. I do. I do want them to know where to put the commas and the periods and stuff but you have to we're getting the cart before the the horse before the cart. No, that's the right way. The cart before the horse that's the wrong way.
SPEAKER_00:Well also they're just two different sets of skills and it would be really nice if we could separate them like work on the mechanics. That's why I love Charlotte Mason and the European continent emphasis on copy work and dictation in France last year. French people love dictation I studied in France for a year of college and the first week I was there one of my teachers had us do a sight unseen two-page single line space dictation. So the front of a page and the back of the page I got 83 mistakes because I'm an American English speaker. This was sight unseen. I was new to the French university system. Like they love dique. And last year in France a thousand people gathered on the Champs Élysée at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to do a group diquet. So like we can celebrate being good at punctuation spelling, handwriting, taking a text sight unseen and accurately punctuating it. Like that's a beautiful kind of fun marathon run a marathon kind of challenge. Yeah. Like that's what we want to see it as like this is a skill but that's completely separate from the ideas in your head. The ideas in your head deserve to be valued even if I gouged out both your eyes and chopped off both your hands. You don't have to be good at spelling and punctuating to be considered a good writer. A good writer is somebody who has thoughts that they value that generate insight and entertainment for other people. And here's what's amazing our kids are great at it. They are quirky, they're inventive they don't use all the tried and true cliches because they don't know them yet. Their perspective is unique. One of the analogies I use in my book is a lot of times the way writing gets taught is that you're supposed to imitate an adult writer. So like Aesop you know write a fable like Aesop or copy this you know descriptive paragraph that was created by an adult and do some version of that as an eight-year-old it's almost like they're saying your writing will be valuable once it sounds like an adult wrote it. That's kind of the messaging but imagine if we did that with the photographs of our children. Like we take a picture of them at age seven and then we photoshop it to look like the adult they will become that's what we're doing. We're taking the mind life of a child and photoshopping it into the mind life of an adult in our writing instruction instead of valuing each adorable expression of a mind as it grows over time. What's so beautiful is the collection of writings I have of my kids are actually more precious to me than my photo albums. When I go back and read them I am instantly awestruck by their ingenuity, their vocabulary their senses of humor. Sometimes my heart is ripped out. I found this um this journal of my oldest son who struggled with anything that looked like organized learning, any organized structured learning at all. And he had a series of free writes that were literally painful. Like I read them just a few weeks ago and I wanted to call him he's 37 I felt the angst of all of that he is a self-taught computer programmer with three children and a wife and a house somehow got there right quit college three times taught himself everything he knows and rereading that knowing who he actually is was painful because I thought I think I was worried and he could feel my worry. He was my oldest child I didn't have a blueprint or a roadmap. I didn't know how to trust all of the process but that's what we need to do. And I'm grateful that he had a place where he felt he could tell his truth that he could get this angst that was living inside of him out onto a page and not hide it. I'm certain that I read it back then. We probably talked about it back then. But I share that with you because I think I think in our rush to try and get our kids to fit in, we actually damage them. We harm them there's a story I tell in my book about this 69 year old man that I met at a business networking event. He has built multiple six, seven and eight figure businesses. Like the guy is really smart. And I told him oh well I run you know this homeschool business for writing right like that doesn't sound the same to a guy like that. And he said oh tell me about it. So I described that we teach these classes where we bring in the parents and the kids together and we teach not just the child but the parent how to be a good writing coach and ally to their child. And he said oh I wish I had had that and I said oh really and then he unfolded this story of how he wrote a paper it was like a short story in elementary school his mom loved it his friends loved it he turned it in and when it came back it got an A for content and an F for grammar. And he said that F has loomed so large in his life that to this day he only uses voice to text. If he's giving a presentation from front of the boardroom and there's a whiteboard he makes someone else do the writing on the whiteboard while he's talking that he is terrified to write emails because he's so worried he'll make a mistake. He's 69 and I said to him you know what it didn't have to be that way and he got tears in his eyes the amount of trauma that we justify in the name of writing correction is horrifying. I meet these adults all the time every conference I give there is a mass of adults who have writer's block and yet they double down on the same methods that harmed them with their children because they've never heard there was another way.
SPEAKER_02:Okay let's go into that what is the other way just give us I know like I've spent hours and hours reading all of your content and all the tips and tricks and things like that. Just give us like two or three getting started you know like if I wanted to treat my child differently or my microschool kids differently around writing tomorrow what are some light things that I could you know go in with the very beginning is to catch your child in the act of self-expression and to jot it down.
SPEAKER_00:So you're making dinner, your child comes running in from the backyard they're like hey Rocky was chasing a squirrel you know they're talking about their dog just turn the stove off grab a pencil the back of an envelope and without saying a word don't announce anything just start writing the exact words your child's saying a child will likely say something along the lines of Mom, what are you doing? And you say back to your child, this is so good. I don't want to forget it so I'm writing it down. That's your script. And most kids will keep talking some will double the length that they talk because that's a pretty impressive moment. Some kids don't like you to jot it down and so if they tell you to stop just make eye contact listen like you are a little audio recorder. And the second they walk away jot down as much as you remember as close to what they said as you can. That night at dinner I want you to pull out the envelope and simply say hey Josh was telling me about how Rocky was chasing a squirrel in the backyard and I was afraid I was going to forget it. So I wrote it down. I just want to share it with you and read their exact words to the family and just value it as communication. It's obvious that it's writing because you wrote it down. The words that would have disappeared into the thin air are now protected and preserved on the back of this envelope. When you're done toss it in the library basket and over the next few weeks when you're reading library books every now and then just pull it out oh remember that story Josh told let's read it again. The first message your children need around writing whether they're 16 or six is that the writer lives inside and is self-expressed through a mouth not that it comes through a pen. And until they know that their inner life the way it lives in them with the vocabulary that's natural to them is worthy of the page and being read and appreciated until they know that they don't know what writing is they think it's about spelling they think it's about guessing what the teacher wanted them to say. So we always start by jotting down those free thoughts. And if you have a teenager they might not tell you a story in quite the same way. I say just wait until you're having a discussion over a rule in the family, right? Like how many hours they can be on the computer or whether they're allowed to drive alone downtown or go on a date, whatever it is, jot down their reasoning for their point of view. Stay very interested and write it all down. Oh, and you think this and this is how you understand it. And then share that with the other parent the three of you and value the thought life in writing that's the beginning of the writing life.
SPEAKER_02:I love that. So I've done this with my kids that hate writing and it was like instantly it switched from the I hate writing and this is not a thing to you see me as a writer. You see me as someone who has valuable thoughts and I'm like I'm so sorry for whatever I did before. Like they were even like like saying these things to me and I would we were I remember it was we were up way too late. We stay up so late reading novels together me and my boys I know sometimes people say like my kids are too old to read aloud to them like never hope that never happens. We're never reading it to my husband allowed I did it for years. Yeah that's great. Yeah so we're up super late reading and I just like paused and asked a question and they like gave some like little like not an answer that they haven't hadn't really thought about it. But I wrote it I had a notebook and I wrote it down and then I wrote down what the other son said and he they were like what are you doing? I was like oh your thoughts are just so interesting. I just wanted to get them down right just like you say. And then the discussion changed suddenly they were very pensive and they were like how I really feel about this is blah blah blah blah blah blah like it was just like just erupted with thought and like we were suddenly having this very deep conversation about like a real issue in the world and like how they are anyways it was just like our conversation just got so real because I was showing them that it mattered and that like making a record of something matters.
SPEAKER_00:And that they will come to you once they believe that they'll even ask you to write things down for them. I remember when my son Liam was four and he was making all these little Lego men and they each had superpowers and kinds of skills and points associated and he really wanted me to love this system but there was no way I was going to remember it. So I got a clipboard and I put a little sheet of paper on it and I said tell me about each one so I wrote down their names and their special powers and what they did for each one. And then I wrote down the points he assigned to them. He carried that clipboard around for a month he was four and he started adding zeros to the end of the numbers like it started out at 40 by the end it was like 40 billion right but think about that then every time we read it the number changed because he had made an actual change to the number and so his understanding of reading and writing were so blended so early that the thoughts in his head mattered. He memorized what order I had written them in. He couldn't read yet but he was proud of the fact that there was a written record of these little Lego characters. My daughter Johanna one time jotted down an entire version of Cinderella that her sister told her at bedtime when I was out one evening I came home she meets me at the front door she's like Catrin wrote a story and I'm thinking Catrin's five she hasn't written yet and then Johanna pulls out a clipboard and here she's transcribed this entire story at the pace of Catrin telling it it's all sloping bad handwriting misspellings beautiful story. And she understood that this is what we do in our family. If people are saying great thoughts we better get them down right so that's the first step. The second step you talked about before and that is free writing. So when we make the shift from you being the transcriptionist for your child to them writing their own thoughts we give them time and space to write however it comes out but we do it as a group like I love that you shared that it was a family practice on a Saturday morning. This is not a timed writing test and it isn't something we do to our children. It's something we do with them. I'm really big on family free writing the point of it is this we dedicate a little short span of time you could start with three or five minutes. You set the timer you know up on the stove everybody's got a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and then you write without stopping that's the only rule. There's no crossing out there's no starting over you just keep writing so if you get stuck and you can't think of something to say you just write I'm stuck I'm stuck I'm stuck or I hate this or it's really stupid or you know I wish I could go play on the computer like you write what comes to your brain because what you're doing is you're training your hand to take dictation from your mind, to follow that ticker tape of thoughts and to put it in written language. What ends up happening is kids who learn how to do that start to value their own thoughts. They're putting their own thoughts into a written record that can be read back. I had one of my kids who was just not as into journaling some really love journaling some don't but he would be really sad at the end of like an overnight camp experience or a rock climbing wall competition and he'd he'd be so nostalgic for it it would like hurt his heart. And I said well I know you don't like journals but you could keep a special occasion journal where you just write after something that's really meaningful the same way you would have taken pictures of it. Just write a little record of it and you can just do that whenever it happens. He's in his 30s and he still has it and it's just one composition book but it's got all of his most precious memories as a child written at that age and stage of development in his own hand. This is the gift we're trying to give our families is the freedom to value their own thinking. I write in my book a whole bunch of free writing prompts ways to use that activity if you pre-order my book we actually are giving a family free writing guide to everybody who pre-orders so that's those are kind of the two beginning steps for a really vibrant writing life but of course I have all kinds of strategies for revision and editing where the parent learns how to give the kind of feedback that a child can receive because that's really where the rubber meets the road. You're trying to correct something that the child already thinks is good. And we have lots of strategies for that too.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah so you're saying that there is a time to like circle back and like let's talk about some mechanics let mechanics let's talk about some thought organization ideas but it isn't the first thing you do.
SPEAKER_00:It's not the first thing and we also approach it completely differently. So to give you a thumbnail sketch most people approach it like here are some things to fix and change, right? That's that's the teacher. But a reader doesn't a reader reads to the interested so the kind of feedback I have parents give is what I call reader response feedback. So you're gonna read like the first two sentences and you might notice in your body oh this is a cool topic I'm interested in knowing more. So you're gonna literally say to your child or write on the sheet of paper to your child, cool topic octopuses, I don't know that much about them. Thanks for that topic. Then two sentences later you're reading along and they have this really interesting like description about the tentacles and it grips you and you say wow that's suction cups like we have on the back of our you know rinse side of the sink holding that little mat down. You described it to be like that. That is a comparison I've never thought of did you know that's called a simile you just used a simile that's amazing. Okay. Now you keep going and they say something they do a non sequitur and you're you're suddenly off track and you don't know why they went there. And so you say I'm reading along I'm really following and then you brought up something from our Lake Michigan visit. I'm curious to know more about that. How does that connect? I'm curious about that as opposed to disconnected vague off topic that's a teacher comment. A reader comment is much more generous. It's the same way you spoke with your child when they were learning to talk. Sometimes you'd say things like did you mean to say and then you give them a script and they copy it. You don't feel bad about that but you would never say no that's not how you say it. You know you should know already how to say it. That's not how we talk to children. So when we're being readers who are responding we're actually sharing the impact of the writing which is the only reason anyone writes is to have an impact on a reader.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So I give you all kinds of understandings of how to be that reader. What are things you can say because you have to train yourself. It's not something you know how to do because you've been indoctrinated by school. And we have these strategies for revision that teach kids to get comfortable making changes without improving the writing. So the goal isn't to improve it it's just to get comfortable imagining that it could be a different way. Could we write it in a different voice? Could we turn it into a lie? Could we just count three adjectives and just change three adjectives like what you know using a die. Just roll the dice oh the number is five we're gonna change five nouns and just see what that feels like as opposed to it always being like the perfect standard lives in the imagination of this other person. And I didn't do a good enough job yet of guessing what that is.
SPEAKER_02:One of my favorite suggestions that we've done is like they'll do a free write and then um one of your prompts I think is something like rewrite it as if everyone were pirates or something love that. And my mom my my kids lost it. Like they were having so much fun and I'm like okay this feels so much different and when I told them first like they they've used they used several other writing programs which I won't mention but um I was talking about maybe doing this is before we started kind of trying this new writing approach and they were like does that mean that we wouldn't have to do this and this like all like naming all of the mechanics and grammar things and simultaneously my two boys 10 and 10 and 12 simultaneously fist bump in the air and they just yell freedom and I'm like oh my gosh that was like it seemed like you scripted that in a movie and that was real like simultaneously shouts of freedom and I'm like I just want that for every child and I want to be able to continually to like give that that to my kids and I I feel like we just don't know how. And so I'm so grateful for your work in painting that picture. How do we do this?
SPEAKER_00:That's right. And you know there is a time at the end of this lengthy process after a child feels red, after they've messed with it Six Ways to Tuesday, after they enhance the content to then do what I call the mechanics mop-up, which is just cleaning up the the stragglers, right? But here's the amazing thing your kids are capable of doing it. We don't need a teacher to prove they know where a period goes we need the child to know where it goes. So when a teacher goes through and makes all those changes they've done research that shows it never shows up in the next paper. That doesn't improve anyone's skill set to see that a teacher knows how to spell a word. That's absurd. What we want to do is send our kids back to their own papers weeks later or a week later where they have some distance and we ask them to put on their own editor hat. And then I use this language I say go through your paper now and make sure you like all your spelling and punctuation choices. That's very different than go through and correct your mistakes because sometimes the choice is deliberate. You misspell it because it's supposed to be misspelled in that character's personality or you don't use a period because you really do want it to be a run-on sentence there are reasons to make choices that go against conventions but we want our kids to go through first and see if they can even see their own writing challenges you will be amazed. And I give a little strategy for how to set that up for success and a little guide that you can give your kids but that's all in this book Help My Kid Hates Writing and it's in our curriculum at Bravewriter. And this approach, you know, it takes time to get used to but once you're in it starts to feel very natural because it is it's the natural way you want to be with your family. It's not this weird adopted persona of teacher.
SPEAKER_02:Right. I love it. And it has really changed our family so I'm so grateful for it. Tell everyone how they can learn more about your work.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah so I'm on Instagram at JulieBraveRider so please follow me there. I have a Substack called Brave Learning with Julie Bogart. It includes a weekly podcast for kids on Monday mornings called Monday Morning Meeting and it's me talking to kids giving them one sort of creative way to embrace their learning that week and so far the feedback's been incredible. Like the kids just do all of it. It's very fun. And especially if you feel limited in your own imagination you can sort of borrow mine for a little while and get in the groove. And then I have my books all on sale at my author site juliebartwriter.com. I have the Brave Learner which is the book that tells my pedagogy about homeschooling raising critical thinkers you know needs no explanation in this moment.
SPEAKER_02:I see it on your books deck. Yep. And this is also one of our top 10 books at Prenda so as you go through the prenda professional development when you get to our master guide level of training it is one of the books you read and that we constantly recommend all of our books that's amazing.
SPEAKER_00:And then my final and newest book is Help My Kid Hates Writing How to Turn Struggling Students into Brave Writers comes out April 15th 2025 and I'm very excited about it. So thank you for letting me talk about it.
SPEAKER_02:My goodness I'm so excited to get it I can't wait. And then just to wrap up who is someone we always ask this question because we're trying to inspire our audience to become grown ups who can kindle the love of learning the passion the motivation in the next generation so who was that person for you and how did they support you, see you, hear you and help you become the person that you are today Wow I could go two ways.
SPEAKER_00:Am I allowed to have two the first one though I would say is Peter Elbow who I mentioned earlier. His book Writing with Power I read in 1981 when I was 20 and it that's when it came out and I remember writing in the margins I still have that copy of the book in fact wow you mean other people write this way I think what really struck me when I read his work is that nowhere in my academic education had anyone spoken to me like the writer I was. And here was somebody who was at a university level speaking to the masses of academics that know actually this is the right pathway to grow as a writer. It's not reserved only for professionals. It is also true for academic writing which is by the way my favorite kind of writing so I really valued his approach he's very curiosity driven very writing voice driven so that was a massive influence on my business Brave Rider, Bravewriter.com but then the other person who had a massive influence on me is the British educator Charlotte Mason. I think her education of the whole child, her passion for seeing children as persons right now, not adults in training or adults mini adults really challenged the idea that school was putting out which is everything is for the future. We're doing all of this for the future I think I really adopted her sort of rich vision for nature study, art history, reading living literature, using a kinesthetic approach to all of the activity of learning not just book learning. So I would say those are the two really formative people in my imagination around learning. Oh my gosh, definitely and there's a book called another one he wrote called Writing Without teachers that is equally phenomenal and really good for people who are working in any kind of micro school academic setting. So I highly recommend that too I'm gonna get that today.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you so much for taking the time to come and share with us. We've learned so much I'm just feeling like so inspired and excited to write and to help my kids write. And I just appreciate all of your work and thank you so much for coming on the Kindled Podcast.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Katie.
SPEAKER_02:The Kindled Podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy to start and run an amazing microschool based on all the ideas we talk about here on the Kindled Podcast. Don't forget to follow us on social media at PrendaLearn and if you'd like more information about starting a microschool just go to prenda.com. Thanks for listening and remember to keep Kindling
