Do your children post their essays on their own blog sites? If not, why not?

My curriculum emphasizes writing. From the fourth grade through the 12th grade, every student writes a weekly essay for the social science and humanities courses. Over the full period, this is over 800 essays.

We ask parents to read the essays and make grammatical corrections.

Parents should require their students to post their corrected essays on their own blog sites.

WordPress . com is a free blog site service. It is ideal for posting essays.

We also recommend that when students finish their essays for the day, they post links to their essays on the appropriate course forums. This way, other students can click through and see what they have written.

Students take more care about writing when they know that their essays are going to be public documents before the weekend is over.

Over time, students and parents can see the improvements in the students’ writing. This reinforces the value of the program. It also lets students know that they have not wasted their time.

Students get better through lots of practice. By the time they graduate from the program, they are accomplished writers.

Most high school students don’t write many papers. They are not good writers. RPC students have this skill, so they have a real advantage in college courses that require term papers.

For more information on why a blog site is a good idea, read this.