Description
IEW Writing – Structure & Style for Students – level B
Wednesdays, 9:00-9:55am with 3 days of 30 minute independent work between classes
Registration is either for Fall 2026 semester-long course (13 weeks) or full year (26 weeks)
Students should be able to write in-class but spelling accuracy is not critical as long as their writing is understandable.
Sample of topics covered over the course of a 2-year sequence:
- Keyword outlining & oral reports
- Writing from outlines
- Retelling narrative stories
- Summarizing references
- Inventive writing
- Writing from pictures
- self-editing
- Creating titles
- Using strong verbs
- Using adverbs and quality adjectives
- Sentence openers
- Introduction to topic sentences and clinchers
- who/which clauses
- because clauses
- subordinating conjunction clauses
- prepositional sentence openers
Students who are taking this course for the second year will reinforce some of these topics and will have different source texts. If the student is able, those texts may be longer and have more paragraphs.
- Small (1″ to 1-1/2″) 3-ring binder dedicated to writing class (can be shared with Junior Great Books)
- approximately 50 sheets of lined notebook paper
- writing utensils (preferably a mechanical pencil for those who like a consistently sharp point!)
PARENTS will be required to read a weekly summary of skills on our learning management system so that you can appropriately support your student at home. Parents will also have to spend approximately 10-15 minutes/week doing VERY SIMPLE editing (with instructions) of student work so they can finish their independent work.
Students will get feedback and guidance from the instructor.
IEW has a master outline of 9 writing topics/concepts that are taught through their curricula using longer and more complex content at each level. Each course covers a combination of the master curricula’s units, but they all cover Unit 1 to ensure that students with no prior IEW experience have the foundation of keyword outlining.
IEW’s method is to teach writing by first learning from existing pieces of writing. The students learn the mechanics of good writing FIRST and then help them create original works.
Many of IEW’s writing concepts are taught to all ages with the major difference being the complexity of the sample or model content. These will be shorter and easier written works for younger students and longer works for the older students. For older students, the work may be more in-depth or complicated. If the older students are not able to read and interpret complex pieces of work the lower level IEW courses can teach the same content–simply swapping out the model writings for less lengthy or complicated work.
This particular course’s content is targeted to students roughly aged 8-11 years old. This means the content is often only one paragraph long and not complex in interpretation or high level vocabulary. The writing concepts taught will not be different from a higher level course–only the model writings used. As a result, the student work products will also be shorter at the elementary level.
If you have a child that is intimidated by writing, has no formal writing experience or is new to IEW’s writing model, this can be a good fit.
