Teaching Kids to Write
Posted by Danielle Bean in Family on Thursday, January 08, 2009 11:27 AM
A recent school assignment for my oldest daughter Kateri required her to write a paragraph about a family event. She complained that she had nothing to say, but I encouraged her to choose an event that she would enjoy telling about.
In the end, she wrote a funny “scary” story that was way longer than the required paragraph. Perhaps it’s because the story was about my own foolish kids, but when I read it, I laughed until I cried.
This isn’t the first time that I’ve noticed how giving children a little bit of freedom encourages them to practice writing in ways that restrictive assignments never could.
There is a place in schools and homeschools for grammar drills and punctuation lectures, but I think we help our kids learn to write best when we also teach them that the process can be fun.
A few years ago, when my oldest kids discovered the computer and begged for ever increasing privileges, I was hesitant. How much time did I want them to spend in front of the screen each day?
I never could have imagined, however, the good that would come from allowing them to have their own (private) blogs and giving each of them a set amount of time online each day.
They are motivated to write up their own stories in the evenings so that they can type them and post them to share with cousins and friends the next day. They do things like extra chores or reading aloud to younger siblings in order to earn the privilege of extra computer time. They spend this extra time in Word, typing up their latest fantasy and adventure novels or reading and posting book reviews on their blogs.
Along the way, they ask for or look up the spelling of new words, they experiment with vocabulary and plot lines, and they listen to my suggestions for grammatical improvements. All along, they consider this not work, but fun. This is quite a scheme I have going.
Whether your children attend school in a classroom or at home, there are lots of fun ways that we parents can supplement and enhance their creative writing skills at home.
What kinds of things do you to encourage your children to write?
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