Frog Hollow brings language arts program to homeschoolers in the Valley

Published 5:40 pm Thursday, December 10, 2015

Persuading your parents to do something for you might be one of the hardest things to achieve as a child, but at the Frog Hollow School in Carnation, it’s part of the lesson plan.

Frog Hollow is a one-day-a-week language arts program for home schoolers 7 through 12. Becca Hall, the founder and teacher at Frog Hollow, started the program in 2011 after a friend asked her to work with their son.

“My friend was home   schooling her son for a year and asked if I could work with him,” Hall said. “I thought it would be a lot more fun if there was a group of kids and that’s where the idea of the class got started.”

Hall hosts these classes every week with one class in Carnation on Wednesdays and another in Seattle on Fridays.

Hall, with a bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford and a master’s in environmental writing from the University of Montana, chose to focus her program on language arts. The Frog Hollow School is intended to be just one part of a child’s home schooling experience and provides a different learning environment from a standard classroom experience.

“There is space for a lot more learning styles so for kids who don’t have the kind of style where you need to sit still and listen there are a lot of other ways to learn and alternative education makes a space for all that,” Hall said.

Now Hall’s group of children are working on Convince-A-Parent persuasive essays; They use the writing skills they’ve learned to try and persuade their parents to do something for them.

“We go through ‘what do we want’ and ‘why do we want it,’” Hall said. “We listed some reasons why there might be some hesitancy about that and what are our solutions to those.  We outlined a sample and now the kids are working on their own outlines. Next week, we will turn them into actual paragraphs and revise them.”

The program also focus on other forms of writing like poems, field guides, plays, and songs. Hall’s goal is to get the children thinking about revision and editing just as much as getting the words down on the page and these different forms of writing allow her to teach that.

“Creative writing is a really great thing to focus on because mostly what you are learning in elementary school is how to spell and how to construct a sentence, you can do that whether you are writing poems, or stories,” she said. “Poetry especially is a really fun form to work with because it’s short and kids can hear some poetry, have an idea or prompt that comes from that poem, write their poem and go back and revise it for spelling and grammar. We can do all the different parts of language arts in an hour.”

Because Hall teaches students of varying skill levels, she has designed her curriculum to be able to scale between all of her students. Using the field guide assignment as an example, Hall said the students can write a sentence or several paragraphs based on the same subject. This allows each student to learn at his or her own pace, without holding them up to a generalized standard.

“I think its really wonderful because a lot of kids aren’t right at grade level so in a class there isn’t one line that everyone is expected to be at,” she said. “There’s just a lot more space for kids to really be where they are and learn the things they need to learn.”

The reasons children are home schooled can vary quite a bit and Hall has seen children come in with many different backgrounds.

“I get a really broad range of home schoolers. Kids get home schooled for all different kinds of reasons,” Hall said. “Some families move around, so school doesn’t really work with them. Some kids aren’t great fits for a traditional classroom, there are some who home school for religious reasons. Some just don’t want to have that structure in their family life.”

Because of this broad range, Hall thought that she could help fill a needed role in the Valley’s homeschooling options which include the Labyrinth home education co-op in Samammish and the Parents and Riverview Actively Delivering Education (PARADE) program in Carnation.

“The Valley has a lot of really great support or home schooling,” Hall said.

Looking ahead, Hall said she might be able to take on a teenage class in 2016, but needs to find time to balance her teaching and her writing. For now, Hall’s focus is on the children she teaches each week.

“It’s really fun to see the kids get really excited about writing. I’ll get kids who start out with a big block against writing and then their Mom’s say ‘I have to take her flashlight away, she’s in bed writing at 10 o’clock at night!’” Hall said. “It feels really good to be doing work that I love and the kids love and seems to be some kind of purpose in the community. It’s just satisfying.”

Autumn Schaub, 11, comes to Becca Hall to get help on one of her assignments before the class goes to lunch.