I am huge fan of Julie Bogart, her book The Brave Learner, and her program Jot It Down. Studying her methods has fundamentally transformed the way that I conceptualize my children as writers. Before my new understanding emerged, I believed that writers were the people who actually wrote the story down; ergo, my children who could not read yet much less write sentences were not writers in my mind. The idea that they were writers based on their wonderfully creative stories rather than on their ability to transfer those stories from their minds to the paper was revolutionary to me.

I followed @thebravelearner on Instagram, and each Friday she posts a Friday Freewrite prompt. The idea of having a time each week that the children could write creatively in any form they wanted appealed to me. That day I found empty (or mostly empty) notebooks around the house for each of them and wrote their names inside the notebooks so that each child would know it was not something they had to share. I even made one for three-year-old Finiasi, although I was unsure if he would sit still long enough to participate. My plan was that each Friday I would sit down with the kids individually, and they would dictate their stories to me one on one. 

The first day’s stories were a massive hit. We used the prompt: “Two birds were chatting after migrating south for the winter. One bird says to the other, ‘You won’t believe the trip I had!” What happened?’” Each child wrote a completely different story, and Finiasi’s was the funniest. As soon as Afa got home from work that evening, we read all three stories aloud to him. Because Fin’s was so random, we were cracking up at every sentence. I think I read each of the stories at least three times that night. They loved listening to their own writing, and Afa loved being involved in some of our school from the day.

My goal was to allow them to write whatever they wanted with no rules, but it became quickly apparent that Fin’s first story was such a huge success that they wanted to tell me that story over and over again. So I created a rule that they have to use their own stories and are not allowed to steal Fin’s, but anything else goes. Hence, we get a lot of stories about poop. The characters are pooping or they get pooped on their heads or any number of ways that poop and toilets come into the stories. At first, I wanted them to take the assignment more seriously, but I had to remind myself that this was not a serious assignment. One of the main goals was to have fun, both writing the stories and reading them at the end of the day. Therefore, the poop stories continue.

I have found fascinating trends like the fact that they have recurring characters in their stories. We had a prompt about clouds one day, and Eliam wrote a story with a Brother Cloud and Daddy Cloud, a very unveiled reference to him and his dad. Brother Cloud and Daddy Cloud show up often in his stories. It has also been fascinating to watch how their story arcs develop. At first, most of the stories were random ideas thrown together. With no instruction or guidance from me, they now write stories with an intro, a climax and a denouement. Ana Lia’s denouement is almost always “everybody died and then lived happily ever after.”

The Friday Freewrite notebooks sit on the same book shelf as all our other books, and when we do read aloud time, the kids are allowed to pick the notebooks like they would choose any other read aloud. This is a small way to impart to them that they are already writers. Long before they can form letters or understand grammar, they are writers. Their stories belong on the shelves beside all the writers that we know and love. When friends come over to hang out, the children ask, “Do you want to read our stories?” Our guests are always thrilled to participate, and everyone is cracking up the whole time.

Another way that I have used freewriting is with my nephew during his seizure treatments. We were making the three hour drive from his hospital to his house, and he started telling me this ridiculous story. He was having a seizure every 20 minutes in his car seat, so I was trying to think of anything I could to make his journey a little more enjoyable. I remembered how much my kids loved hearing their stories read back to him, so I pulled my phone out and started typing furiously to record his whole story. When he was finished, I read it all back to him and just like in our home we were laughing so hard. Multiple times over the next week that I got to spend with him, he asked me to read his story out loud. It was such a source of joy to both of us during a very challenging time.

Friday Freewrite is one of the ways that we have personalized our homeschool. In Jot It Down, the idea is to be more spontaneous with writing down the kids’ stories, but I wasn’t consistent in doing that. The Friday Freewrite prompts are often too advanced for my kids, so we adjust them to a more appropriate level, and free writing isn’t included as a regular part of Charlotte Mason homeschooling, which is the homeschooling philosophy we generally adhere to. Even though we don’t do it the way everyone else does, it is a precious time each week and each time we get to share it with other people.