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Today K had her first “lesson” in keyword outlining, IEW (Institute for Excellence in Writing) style. We do not have any of their curriculum at this time, but I do assist in an IEW class at our co-op and I have taught the class before. (Of note, H is going to be using their Bible Heroes unit next fall.)

The basics of the IEW approach are that you take a writing sample and go through it sentence by sentence, noting up to three key words from each one. Once you have completed your keyword outline, you put the original away and use your outline to write your own version of what you just read.  There is actually more to that as the class gets going, like dress-ups, which are things like who/which clauses, -ly adverbs, strong verbs, quality adjectives, and adverbial clauses. These are gradually added into the student’s writing as they progress. For now, I just wanted to give K a couple tools for writing reports. She always wants to “write reports,” but they are usually not quite reports.

Below is what she wrote, in rough-draft form. (I corrected the two spelling errors and the one incorrect form of a word.)

Horses

A horse is a creature with four legs and a mane. Horses are herbivorous animals. That means they only eat plants and no meat. Horses are mammals. That means they feed their young milk. 

Horses have three groups-ponies, heavy, and light. Ponies are small horses that are less than fifty-eight inches tall. Heavy horses are used for pulling carriages and riding for work. Light horses are used for racing and pleasure riding. Arabians are light horses used for saddle-riding. Light horses also do harness racing where the horses pull the driver in a two wheeled cart.