Our Homeschool Writing Experiment: Tutorial | Homeschool Writing Project

Today I’d like to share our experience writing a Tutorial, or How-To Essay! Maybe you’ve been following along this year, reading about the ups and downs of Our Homeschool Writing Experiment. This is our third year homeschooling, and our first two years, I really bounced around trying to find a writing curriculum I liked. I never found one that checked all my boxes!

Last summer, I took matters into my own hands! I did some research, and put together a plan. By the end of this 2025-2026 school year, my kids and I will have tried 15 different writing genres! I hope to blog about all 15, and share a lot of resources from our trial and error.

Today I’d love to cover a really fun one, that was a bit shorter and simpler than, say, the Grandparent Interview Project or even the Restaurant Review Project. Writing a tutorial seemed pretty easy and quick–to me, and also to my kids! We soon found out that writing a tutorial is harder than we thought!

How To Teach about Tutorials & How-To Essays

When I planned out how to present this writing project, I goofed a bit! I had found this viral video of a kindergarten teacher making peanut butter & jelly. If you haven’t see this one, definitely check it out! A kindergarten teacher has instructed her students to write down the simple steps, to making a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich. She then gathers the materials (bread, peanut butter, jelly, knife) and starts reading their tutorials aloud, seeing if she can follow them.

Hilariously, she can’t! They did not include quite enough information, and so she follows their tutorial instructions very literally. The result is hilarious. At one point, she starts smearing the peanut butter onto her arm, because the student’s instructions didn’t specify to spread it on the bread! Of course, this is highly entertaining for the kids, and a powerful, memorable learning moment: I bet they will never forget the importance of specific detail, in their writing again!

So, back to my goof–don’t do what I did! I was so tickled by the video, that I goofed, and showed it to my kids as my “lesson hook–” my way of getting them excited about the new writing project. (Face palm!) Don’t get me wrong, they loved the video, but I had just given part of the fun part away! I should have had *them* write a practice tutorial first, then tried to act it out, in the same way this teacher did!

Luckily, it still worked out. Here’s how I ended up structuring our Tutorial Writing Lesson. This is the specific pacing I used, throughout the course of one week:

• Day 1: Introduce Tutorial Essay. Show PB&J Video. Talk about subjects in which kids feel they are “experts,” then brainstorm a list of potential subjects together.
  • My son loves soccer, fishing, and Age of Empires. My daughter loves gymnastics, drawing and painting. These were some of their ideas, or “areas of expertise” they could use for their tutorials, on Day 1.
• Day 2: Sample Tutorial. I had the kids write a tutorial for a very simple task: washing your hands. I was hoping they had some distance from the hilarity of the pb&j video, the day before…and they did! They wrote tutorials, then I acted out their instructions step by step. They were hilariously incomplete!
  • We talked about what steps were left out, and why they were important. We filled in the gaps in each other’s handwashing tutorials.
• Day 3: Selecting their “expertise,” and write a rough draft of steps. One key factor in this project is to make sure they narrow down their “expertise” to something extremely specific. For example: my son loves to fish, but writing a “Tutorial On Fishing” is way too broad. There are too many factors. Instead, I had him narrow it way, way, WAY down. Here were my son and daughter’s final topic choices:
  • How To catch A Largemouth Bass in 5 feet of water with a swim jig
  • How to do a pencil drawing of a simple duck

I told you they were specific! Keeping it extremely narrow helps the student write better, more specific steps, and they have a high chance of success for their tutorial.

• Day 4: Read your Tutorial aloud to a friend or sibling, and see if they can follow it. We read our tutorials aloud to each other, and acted out the steps! For example, my son and I both attempted to do a pencil drawing of a duck, based on my daughter’s drawing tutorial. We each had difficulty with a different part of her instructions, so that was helpful feedback for her! After this step, the kids made revisions to their Tutorials.
• Day 5: Final Draft of Tutorial. On the last day, I had the kids turn in a final draft! My daughter is in 2nd grade, and she chooses to print her final drafts neatly on nice paper. (I love these free ones on Teachers Pay Teachers!) She also loves to use my favorite pens (Pilot G7 gel pens in many colors). My son, on the other hand, prefers to type his on the computer. Either way is fine with me, as long as it is a perfected final draft!

Perks of a Tutorial Homeschool Writing Project

To sum it all up, I think this homeschool writing project is one of the best to start with, if you are just dipping your toe in creative writing! Here are the reasons why:

• A Tutorial is little to no prep for you, the teacher
• You don’t need to do any background research, library runs, or extra steps to make the writing happen
• A Tutorial is not long or laborious; the final draft could be as short as half a page
• A Tutorial does not have to be in essay form; it can be a well-constructed list
• Because the project is short, you can easily practice the skills more than once

What do you think? Have you tried any of these projects, and found some easier than others? Let me know!

Cait