Grace Christian Homeschool: Review: Fortuigence Persuasive Essay Writing Course

Thursday, October 9, 2014

Review: Fortuigence Persuasive Essay Writing Course

I can't wait to share today's review product with you. It is the Essay Rock Star Persuasive Essay Writing Course by Fortuigence. I have struggled often on knowing how to teach my children writing. We've used many programs and I've always wished for feedback on their work. Well, the Essay Rock Star Persuasive Essay Writing Course by Fortuigence does just that!

Fortuigence offers several different short courses as a part of their online homeschool writing curriculum. Each short course costs $57. The courses available in the Essay Rock Star curriculum are:

Essay Rock Star Personal Statement Writing Course

Essay Rock Star Persuasive Essay Writing Course

Essay Rock Star Textual Analysis Writing Course

Essay Rock Star Expository Essay Writing Course

or you can also purchase the full Essay Rock Star curriculum that contains all of the courses above for $197. If you are giving high school credit, each short course is worth 0.125 in credits or 0.50 in English credits for the entire curriculum. Please see here for more detail on assigning high school credits.

Course Details

As I mentioned earlier, we chose the short course, Essay Rock Star Persuasive Essay Writing Course. This course is ideal for ages 12-18 and teaches them how to write the persuasive essay which is a skill they need to show while taking many college entrance exams.

This course consisted of 7 lessons.

1. Pre-assessment
2. Brainstorming
3. Organizing Ideas
4. Free Writing
5. Revision
6. Editing
7. Wrap-Up

For each lesson, your student will watch an introductory video explaining the lesson and giving an overview. Then, the student can read the lesson themselves or click on an audio recording of the lesson and follow along.

Included in each lesson are links explaining concepts even further with examples for the student to show them what is expected. Each resource article can be downloaded as a PDF document as well. We found the student samples to be a wonderful resource for us.

Once your student has completed the lesson, they have an assignment to send in to their teacher. You can send in the lesson by copying and pasting it into an assignment box given or by attaching the original file.

Your student will then receive feedback from their live trained teacher telling them if they need to complete any thing further in this lesson or if they are ready to move on to the next lesson.

This is a self paced course. However, once an assignment is sent to the teacher, you will need to wait for their feedback before continuing on to the next lesson. Usually, you receive feedback within 24 hours during Monday-Friday.

How we used this course and what we thought

My 8th grade son worked on this course. We did the first 2 lessons together until he felt like he was ready to do it on his own. It's not that it was hard at all. He was just nervous for someone else to be evaluating his work besides me and I loved the fact that someone else was! Yay, take writing off my check list! He worked on this course usually Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I used my email address for him so I would get the email responses from the teacher and read them to him. You can set up an email account just for your student although you would want it to be one that you monitor. Fortuigence highly recommends that so that the emails do not get lost in the sea of other emails you receive. Stephen would always smile at the feedback. Below is an example of feedback from one of his lessons.

Hi Stephen,

Even though your essay draft is brief, it’s to the point. You’ve got all your reasons, supporting details or stories, and counterarguments covered! Please move on to the next assignment in your online classroom whenever you’re ready.

Thanks,

Ms. I :)

Writing is a difficult subject for him and I think he puts more pressure on himself than he needs to so having positive feedback from someone other than me really helped him to gain confidence in his writing.

Here he is completing lesson. Does anyone else's child sit like this to study?

Sarah, age 11, is a little younger than the recommended age but she saw how much Stephen enjoyed the course and wanted me to sign her up as well. We do plan to do that but I might let Stephen continue through the other courses first seeing as he would benefit from the most at this time.

We would recommend this course to other homeschool families. It is always nice to have feedback from someone else and knocking a subject off my teaching to do list isn't so bad either!.

Other places to find Fortuigence