The Power in Your Hands: Writing Nonfiction in High School, 2nd Edition - Review
Are you stressing about teaching writing to your high school student? I really understand how you feel my oldest daughter is just starting high school and I've been busy making plans.
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this product for review, all opinions are 100% my own.
Teaching writing is something that I've stopped stressing about. I've found a wonderful tool in Power in The Power in Your Hands: Writing Nonfiction in High School, 2nd Edition from Writing with Sharon Watson.
What is The Power in Your Hands?
The Power in Your Hands is a writing curriculum for high school students. Its focus is helping students learn how to write nonfiction reports and essays.
It is available in both print and a digital PDF file. I received the digital versions of both the student textbook and the teacher guide.
The Power in Your Hands contains over 100 daily lessons and step-by-step instructions for completing 21 essays and reports. This is also a self-guided program although it includes a teachers guide your student can easily work through this program on their own.
Have a look at what is covered in this writing program, very thorough!
Table of Contents
Thinking & Planning
Opinions
Persuasion Essentials
Persuasion - Next Level
Persuasion - Logical
Persuasion - Compare and Contrast
Persuasion - Moral/Ethical
Persuasion - Emotional Appeal
Proofreading
Common Grammar Mistakes
Letters & E-mails
Process Writing (How -to)
The Position Paper and Documentation
A Devotional
Newspaper Writing
Biographies
Compare and Contrast
Literary Analysis
The Definition Essay
Descriptive Essays
Personal Testimony or Spiritual Journey
Interview into Narrative
Personal Narrative
How We Are Using The Power in Your Hands
The Power in Your Hands is very different from most writing programs I've tried before. Right from the start student are engaged with a self-test. They are shown a list of questions about writing and asked to check any that apply to themselves.
Some of these are questions about if they find writing easy or difficult and if they have trouble coming up with ideas to write about.
This makes a great tool to see how your child feels about their writing. Do they need some training or encouragement, maybe they need more guidance on how to come up with topics etc.
Since I'm using this with my 14-year old who will soon be starting high school I've chosen to take the lessons nice and slow. She struggles with dyslexia and this can make reading and writing difficult at times so I wasn't sure how this program would work for us.
I was really happy to see that she's really enjoying it! We've been aiming to finish 1 chapter a week so we spend about 2 hours a day working on this writing program. If it starts to be a little overwhelming for her then we just slow down a little and split a chapter over 2 weeks.
Although this is a self-guided program I've found it very helpful to work together on the writing lessons. I've been printing the lessons off one chapter at a time. Then we sit together and I read the lesson aloud and we discuss it. Then we work on the exercises together on our whiteboard or verbally.
Each lesson has a writing topic that is suggested but it's also very easy to substitute your own topic! We've been enjoying a mixture of both. Sometimes we use the suggested writing topic and sometimes I pick one from our history or science lessons. This is working very well for us!
I love it when a curriculum is so easy to adapt to your student's needs, The Power in Your Hands has been a wonderful addition to our writing lessons.
