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10 THINGS WE LOVE ABOUT BRAVE WRITER’S ARROW + BOOMERANG GUIDES

I get asked about Brave Writer’s Arrow and Boomerang Guides all the time. What IS it that we love about Brave Writer’s Arrow and Boomerang guides? Well, besides everything? This post is going to lay out exactly what we love (and maybe what we don’t love) about Brave Writer’s Arrow and Boomerang guides and why we keep going back to them for years now.

Before I tell you my favorite things about the guides though, let me share with you what these guides even are. (I get that question a lot too.)If you need a great way to add meaning and ease to your language arts this year, check out 10 things we love about Brave Writer's Arrow + Boomerang guides.

What the Heck are Brave Writer’s Arrow + Boomerang Guides Anyway?

Let’s do this bullet-list style for ease and speed.

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  • The guides are language arts curriculum based on great book titles.
  • Each guide takes about a month to go through (although we’ve taken much longer to work through one guide.)
  • The guide is divided into four weeks.
  • Each week contains a copywork selection from the book and grammar lessons based on that selection. 
  • You can purchase individual titles OR get a subscription for the year where you are automatically sent the new guide at the beginning of each month.
  • New titles can be purchased individually after they’re released.
  • Read the description for each title. The contents vary a bit based on when they were published. Brave Writer has added new features in the recent years…but the older guides are wonderful too and we use them all the time.
  • The the guides feature some or all of the following: copywork, a literary theme, a writing project, discussion questions, a party guide to go with the book, grammar lessons and info about the author.

Here’s a video I created to walk you through our process of using these guides if you still have questions.

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What We Love About Brave Writer’s Arrow + Boomerang Guides

    1. We can do them as a family. When you have a lot of different aged kids, having a resources that we can all use at once is GOLD! The Arrow guides are more geared toward 3rd-8th grade (approximately) and Boomerang guides are geared toward high school, but based on the title, we’ve used both guides for all my big kids. (Big kids are currently age 16, 13, and 10)
    2. Language arts lessons pulled from our read alouds…the lessons MEAN something! Having your kids do copywork and then a grammar lesson pulled from a passage of a really great book that you’re also reading together REALLY helps the lessons to mean something. I love this about the guides!
    3. The new book list every year gives me great read aloud ideas. Each May, the good folks at Brave Writer announce the new titles they are creating guides for. I LOVE this!! And the titles they pick are always SO good! Here’s a quick look at the books for the current year.

4. There’s a writing project idea in every guide. We are normally working through a Brave Writer writing program like Partnership Writing, but when we’re not working on a project, I love that the guides offer a writing project idea based on the writing style in the book we’ve just read together.

5. The Party School guides are amazing! If you want to start a book club or just have a fun party with your kids at the end of your read alouds together, there is a guide at the end of all the new Arrow and Boomerangs with fun ideas based on the book. I love this part!

 

MORE we Love About Brave Writer’s Arrow + Boomerang Guides

6. The Think Piece Questions. These are just really awesome discussion questions that encourage great conversations with your kids.

7. No busywork. It only takes a few minutes a day and I never end our language arts time feeling like it was a waste of time or not effective.

8. The copywork excerpts. My kids love the copywork. We normally do a new passage on Mondays and study it a few times during the week. There’s always something pointed out in the guides that I didn’t notice while I was reading the book to my kids.

9. The open-ended-ness. This curriculum is not scripted at all, so there is so much space for mama to use her own style. I love that!

10. It’s a curriculum that’s as flexible as I need it to be. You can really do as much or as little with these guides as you want to. If you want to do the party guide, great! If not, no big deal. You don’t have to do the copywork, but you sure can if you want to. I can choose to purchase all ten of the Arrow or Boomerang guides for the year, or I can choose to purchase them individually. There’s so much the mama can decide and I love that!


If you’re in the market for language arts, I hope my sharing what we love about Brave Writer’s Arrow and Boomerang guides was helpful! We’ve been able to add in some Easy Grammar or a spelling workbook if we feel like it, but we always find ourselves dropping those and going back to just the Arrows or Boomerangs.

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