Many people are worried about teaching their kids to write. Children will learn to write when they have the passion to say something. And it may not be until high school or even when they are in post-secondary schooling.

What most unschooling families forget is how children’s brains grow – a big reason why I wrote the book, Unschooling To University, and listed children’s capabilities in each chapter by age. By age 13, your children are going to know more than you do about a lot of subjects. They will know how to research their interests, argue on Reddit, and critically discern information from the internet. Again, writing is a skill developed from a passion. Most children need a passionate reason to write and more importantly, to be heard, and then they may decide to learn the 5 paragraph essay method. There are lots of Youtube videos showing how. (Anything that one wants to learn is on Youtube!) If they are passionately interested in writing, as my one child did, they will live, breathe and learn about writing improvement every day. My other 4 kids were not as keen to learn about writing, but did self-learn the basics in Grade 10 and wrote pretty good research reports in University when they self-discovered the need to learn how for their assignments. All of my kids didn’t do any formal writing until grade 10 when they had to write an essay or 2 for for meeting APS outcomes in courses for credits. The one child who is going into a Masters program this Fall (the writing fanatic) only did 1 ELA course in high school – Grade 11. She challenged the  grade 12 diploma exam because she probably knew as much as any English Language Arts teacher with all her independent self-taught research and knowledge. She also had the time to self-learn everything about crafting novels.

As far as children’s capabilities are, unschoolers go from playing video games/life learning/play/projects and interests to mandatory textbooks in high school pretty easily –  again we have to be aware of how much more capable our children are in the teen years. My math skill ends in grade 8. My 3 children who persued STEM careers had the ability to self-teach from textbooks beyond grade 8. They are average kids. All kids have the ability to self-teach from the interest. By age 13, they have their abstract thinking skills so they can pick up a textbook/or screen and read it. No problem. It’s like the difference of toilet learning between an 18 month-old and a 4 year-old – one takes months and the other can do it in a day – because they are cognitively, physically, and emotionally ready. Have trust in your children’s brains. Their learning will bypass your knowledge.  You can’t force and child to learn and you can’t stop a child from learning. Learn more about how children read and write: