Yes - I'd love to hear more about IEW too.
I am also homeschooling a 9 yo DS. We do writing without tears/or some other copy work in cursive. However if he wants to print or type his other work, that is fine with me. He did NaNoWriMo last fall and he didn't produce a high quality piece of literature!
). But he did get very good at typing and prefers it now! I could never get him to play typing games. He just learned on his own and is now pretty efficient.
We are using the Michael Clay Thompson language art curriculum and I'm very happy with it. There are writing exercises in the book, but they can be done orally or typed. I've extended some of them to go deeper. And he usually does some sort of writing whether or not it's related to that curriculum. He just did a journal with pictures of our 3 week winter vacation on the computer. I'm planning on doing that curriculum as long as we're homeschooling and that's the only curriculum I could say that about. But I wouldn't mind supplementing or adding in something like IEW or Writing Strands at different points.
I very much give and take with my kids on homeschooling. Some weeks history and/or science look nothing like I think it should. But then my 5 year old starts a conversation about how radio waves work, and I think we're probably doing ok.
