[ViolaMum]

Writing With Ease is good and it's easy to do. Everything is scripted, so you just open and go. There is narration, copywork, and dictation each week, with increasingly longer passages. If you get the student workbook, it's all written out for you. If you go with just the instructor manual, she gives you the first couple of passages for each new stage, and then tells you what to look for and you choose your own passages until the next stage.

If your ds is 11, though, I'd look at Writing with Skill, the next level of the program, which is for middle school writers. The workbook is written directly to the student, and there is a teacher manual to help you out when coaching your student. It teaches writing from outlines eventually.

Both are solid writing curricula. They are incremental and work well for kids who want step by step instruction. The narration pushes summarizing (and organizing facts mentally), as opposed to the Charlotte Mason type of narration which is more about remembering as much as possible or what's important to the narrator. I don't believe they are available as downloads, though. Peace Hill Press offers pdf's of the SOTW student pages, so it's possible they do that with their writing programs, but I' haven't checked on it.

The other writing program I really like is Writing and Rhetoric, from Classical Academic Press. It's solidly classical in its approach, and everything is written directly to the student, with a Teacher's Manual available. (The TM is a copy of the student book with the answers written in and notes for what to look for in original assignments.) It follows a lot of the same pattern as WWE - narration, copywork, dictation -but adds a speaking component and some discussion about the passages and their meaning. I hesitate to recommend it to you only because it's not a downloadable product and you'd have to order the books.

A note about Bravewriter assignments - there's freewriting (5 minute chunks) once a week, with occasional revisions of the freewrites. There are smaller assignments like spending 2 minutes observing an object with the parent writing down any and all descriptors the student calls out. You then work with that raw material the next day for a day or two to come up with a paragraph. A larger assignment would be something like making a mail order catalog from a historical period or designing an island chain. The writing is in smaller chunks and it gets spread out over the course of 3-4 weeks, with research happening the first week, then freewriting, then revision, then "publishing." It's very much the way you'd write a research paper.