My aha moment with teaching high school writing to homeschoolers!

Okay. So I had an aha moment. 

I do not use IEW and I do not follow the classical model for writing. 

I follow the model of students writing first sentences (K-2), paragraphs (3-5), then essays (4-8). when they write (I've used Write Source from Great Source for K-6) they learn many different forms: how to writing, cause and effect writing, compare/contrast, descriptive, narrative, poetry... In 7th grade, I wrote my own curriculum that focused first on Show, Don't Tell Writing (lots of printables online for free), then moved into poetry--choosing words on purpose, then into narrative writing where description naturally fits, and then into non-fiction narrative. We end that year with compare/contrast writing. 

This year, we began with summarizing, moved into when to paraphrase, quote, and summarize, and then into a research paper. The research paper was where the waters got muddy. It's an enormous undertaking and I needed to break it down. We started with how to tell what was a good source on the internet and what wasn't (found an awesome presentation on this online!) then chose a topic and evaluated several online sources for info. 

We moved towards writing the research paper, but I still felt like I was treading water a little and that was when my aha moment came!http://www.glencoe.com/.../language_arts/rprw/68rprw.pdf We had started outlining. First phrases and then sentence outline, but I was missing a piece and this it...

In K-8 students learn the forms of writing. Teachers explain when to use this form (and this connection should be also made when they are reading) and the structure of it. Then, in 8th grade they transition... ! 

They must now do 2 thing: 
1. They must be able to write research papers. They must take notes, and then decide what approach is best for the essay (there's a page in that Glencoe book that explains this). Then they outline based on the form they've chosen. For longer papers, you need to combine more than one approach/form ie. for postmodernism, my student is going to begin with a definition, move into a compare/contrast, and end with a cause/effect. 
2. They must read a writing prompt and identify which approach/form is best for that prompt. This is where homeschoolers tend to be weak. We don't want to teach to the test (myself included), but I realized when I started grading my daughter's tests that I have to teach her how to take tests and she does also have to do well on the SAT/ACT because that is what colleges want to see (external validation that she can do fine in college). 

This is huge for me, because I need to make sure that my children can write in all these forms and now I see the big picture of why I'm teaching them how to write all these different ways to begin with!