Unschooling Writing

I wish that I could unschool writing.
Sparkle comes up with all sorts of writing projects for herself.

She created a mini-book about the plants and animals at the local botanical gardens. Each two page spread has an illustration of the plant or animal and one or two sentences describing it. She begged to stay at the gardens for a few more minutes in the sweltering heat so that she could finish the book.

She found a blank picture study notebooking page that I had given up using with her. She copied a painting and wrote a nice little paragraph about it, making some thoughtful connections with her life. Then she found another page and drew an original picture and wrote another paragraph explaining the picture.

She is in the process of creating another mini-book with monsters from Wander's D&D book. She copied the picture of the monster and some of the text describing it -- in beautiful cursive. Sparkle kept balking when I asked her to use cursive in school work, so I finally let her print everything. Her handwriting for school varies from legible to fairly neat, but hardly every as well formed as in this little booklet. She dislikes copywork and is annoyed when she makes mistakes in dictation for school. She discovered her own mistakes when reviewing her work on this booklet and happily corrected it.

However, when it comes to me teaching Sparkle how to write, it's a struggle. She has a hard time figuring out what to say. Her handwriting is sloppy. She wants to know the bare minimum she has to do to get by. On the other hand, I know that she is having fun with her own writing projects because I have taught her the underlying skills, and I need to continue doing so.