Encouraging your child to write well
Some children struggle with writing, finding it difficult to start and continue their stories. Parents can help by providing engaging activities that spark motivation. Gail Smith offers suggestions to show children the power of the written word. Read on to discover more on how to encourage your child's writing journey!
Some children find writing a difficult task. They seem to feel blocked and struggle to start stories and certainly struggle to continue with them. Parents can help by providing some stimulating activities for their child to do that are not difficult but can motivate a child to write.
Consider:
Encourage Daily Journaling: Suggest that your child keep a daily journal. Writing about their day, feelings, or even imaginary stories can help them practise and improve their writing skills regularly.
Read Together Regularly: Expose your child to a variety of writing styles by reading together. Discuss the books, focusing on how different authors use language, structure their stories, and create vivid descriptions.
Use Writing Prompts: Provide fun and engaging writing prompts to spark their creativity. Prompts like "Imagine you have a superpower for a day. What would you do?" can make writing exciting and less of a chore.
Play Word Games: Engage in word games like Scrabble or Boggle. These games can expand vocabulary and improve language skills in a playful and interactive way.
Incorporate Technology: Use writing apps and websites designed for kids. Programs like Grammar for Kids or fun writing games online can make writing more engaging and educational. Talk to your child’s teacher about what they would recommend.
Write Letters: Encourage your child to write letters to family members, friends, or even pen pals. Writing letters can be a fun way to practise different writing and communication styles.
Create a Family Newspaper: Start a family newspaper where everyone contributes articles, stories, or comics. This can be a collaborative project that makes writing a shared and enjoyable activity.
Provide Constructive Feedback: When reviewing your child’s writing, offer positive feedback along with gentle suggestions for improvement. Focus on specific aspects, like adding more descriptive words or varying sentence structure.
Use Visual Aids: Encourage your child to create storyboards or mind maps before writing. Visual planning can help them organise their thoughts and improve the overall structure of their writing.
Set a Writing Example: Share your own writing with your child. Show them drafts, edits, and final versions to demonstrate the writing process and the importance of revision and improvement.
Start A Sentence: Make it a game. You start a sentence, and they finish it. “Yesterday I found an interesting rock. It was……”
Play with Reading Books: When you are reading a book occasionally stop. Let them see that the written word has power and invite your child to change the story. Perhaps they could suggest a different ending.
Have plenty of books and magazines around the house and occasionally read little segments from them out loud. A child's imagination will be enlivened when they begin to talk about their passions and interests. When they start to be motivated about something, encourage them to write about it. Let them see that the written word has power.
“When we write, we feel, see and hear the words.’
-Gail J Smith
Encourage your child to write well
Writing is like giving your child a superpower—a way to express themselves, explore their thoughts, and tap into a world of creativity. It's not just about words on paper; it's about unlocking a whole new level of intellectual, physiological, and emotional growth. Dive into these exciting ideas by Gail Smith to cultivate your child's passion for writing, a skill that lies at the core of education!
Some children find it difficult to write. There are ways we can help them and of course, the best way to help is to write ourselves. There are many intellectual, physiological and emotional benefits to writing. It goes hand in glove with reading and cannot be seen as the poor cousin. It is believed that writing has wonderful therapeutic benefits and gives a child a voice. Words disappear into the ether, but written words can remain forever.
Here are some ideas to help your child build up an interest in writing which is very much at the heart of education.
Designate a special area in your home where your child can write comfortably. It could be a cozy corner with a desk or even just a designated cushion with a lap desk. Let them see that writing is encouraged in your home. Have plenty of writing materials hanging around.
Make sure your child has access to various writing materials such as pencils, pens, markers, crayons, and different types of paper. Let them experiment with different tools. For young children chalk on the ground is great fun.
Establish a regular time each day for writing. It could be before bedtime, after school, or during a quiet period on weekends. Consistency is key to forming good writing habits.
Encourage your child to keep a journal where they can write about their thoughts, feelings, daily experiences, or even stories they make up. Journaling can be a great way for children to express themselves freely. Perhaps giving your child a diary could be a great gift and introduction to writing.
Praise your child's writing efforts and celebrate their achievements, whether it's completing a story, writing neatly, or coming up with creative ideas. Display their work proudly or share it with family and friends.
Let your child see you writing. Whether it's making a grocery list, writing emails, or working on a personal project, show them that writing is a valuable skill used in everyday life.
Reading and writing go hand in hand. Encourage your child to read regularly and discuss the stories or information they encounter. Reading can inspire writing and improve vocabulary and language skills.
Present your child with fun writing challenges, such as writing a poem, creating a comic strip, or crafting a short story with a specific theme or word count. Joining in with these activities will make all the difference to your child.
Help your child understand the importance of writing by showing them how words can inform, entertain, persuade, and connect people. Encourage them to use their writing to express themselves and make a positive impact. Read sections of the newspaper to them that have an impact.
Enjoy reading what they have written. Together you can talk about the content and purpose of writing. Let them read aloud some of your writing as well.
Try suggesting to your child when they want to explain something that you would prefer they write it down for you to read. Sometimes an upset child can write down their feelings easier than talking about them.
Writing is a concrete statement. It can be kept and treasured. Promote your child’s writing by displaying it on fridges etc.
‘Once your child writes down their thoughts, they are expressing to the world a deeper statement about themselves.’ - Gail J Smith
Eight Fun Ways to Enhance Handwriting Skills in Kids!
Here are eight fun ways to enhance handwriting skills in kids
Artistic Doodles: Encourage your child to doodle creatively! Provide them with a dedicated sketchbook and a set of colourful markers or pens. Engaging in imaginative doodling exercises will help them develop better control and precision in their writing. It is also a fun activity that younger children especially enjoy. Take care to affirm their efforts as they progress through the stages of improving their writing.
Tracing Trails: Create fun tracing worksheets with their favourite characters or shapes. Use dotted lines for them to follow along and trace the letters or words. This activity reinforces muscle memory and fine motor skills essential for neat handwriting.
Sensory Writing: Make handwriting tactile and exciting by incorporating sensory materials like sand, rice, or shaving cream. Let your child practice writing letters in these materials, stimulating multiple senses for a more engaging learning experience. Children need to be tactile.
Storytime Calligraphy: Transform handwriting practice into storytelling adventures. Have your child copy short passages from their favourite storybooks or write their own tales in a beautiful font. This activity will inspire them to take pride in their penmanship. Use different pens and pencils, experimenting with shapes and colours.
Buy them a fancy book (perhaps leather bound) where their penmanship can be given full attention and value. Also, encourage them to handwrite thank you notes and to select the best paper and words making them quite a self-expressive gift.
Letter Formation Relay: Set up a relay race where each team member writes a letter on a whiteboard before passing it on. Use timers to create a friendly competition and motivate your child to form letters accurately and efficiently.
Digital Drawing Fun: Utilise drawing apps or interactive pen tablets to merge technology with handwriting practice. Children can trace letters on the screen, experiment with different fonts, and enjoy instant feedback that enhances their handwriting skills.
8. Have fun with the children practising their best signature. Display them on the fridge. Encourage them to keep improving and talk about how that signature symbolises them.
Finally, patience and positive reinforcement are key when teaching children to improve their handwriting. Development can be slow but as they mature you will notice major differences. By making the process enjoyable and creative, you'll motivate them to develop excellent penmanship naturally! Let them see that you are making quite a statement when you send a written note to people. Let them see that their handwriting is all about them.
Our learning increases as we handwrite better. We own it, we created it. Therefore keep up with handwriting so that our memory keeps growing and our personal statement to others is clear.
-Gail J Smith
How to motivate children to write
Here are some great parenting ideas to stimulate your child to enjoy writing.
Teachers will work on teaching children the structures of writing. This does not have to be your job. However, there are some great ideas to stimulate your child to enjoy writing, These simple strategies can be applied at home and in an enjoyable way together. We want writing to simply flow from talking and reading.
Consider:
Have fun making up sentences. For example. Start with: ‘Yesterday I learnt that……’ Let your child finish the sentence.
Play the ‘And’ game.‘I opened my wardrobe and……’ ‘I walked to the park and….’
Have an ideas book. Encourage them to write in it when they get an idea for a story. At the end of the week read out the ideas and have a chat together.
Find a special writing space in your house. Make it creative with plenty of light and encourage children to use it when they get ideas for a story.
Always have the writing materials available and ready to be used.
Have fun in the car. ‘There I see a sad man on the corner. He looks…….’ Let them finish the sentence.
When your child does write a story you can turn it into a book quite easily.
Some children especially boys are more practical and like writing about real items. Suggest they write about their bike, ball games, sports activities, Lego sets etc. It does not have to be about fantasy all the time. Excellent writers can be practical writers who enjoy writing for a purpose.
Encouraging drawing can lead to writing and this is helpful, especially for the reluctant young writer. Let them talk to you about their drawings and hear the story behind them.
Be the model and write a lot. Keep all your lists available to be read. Together write messages that need to be remembered and used.
Write a letter to someone together.
When reading to your child invite them to make up a different ending to the story or perhaps change the beginning or introduce new characters. Read together and talk about the progress of the story.
Message boards with notes to each other is a great visual tool to encourage writing.
Encourage writing a journal. This can be their special words just for their eyes alone.
Finally, writing for many children takes time to evolve. Encourage them to write freely and without reserve. Accept their ideas and let them think through their sentences. The more they feel in control the less they rely on you and their ideas start to take shape. Here it is not about making or correcting their mistakes. No author would ever put punctuation and grammar ahead of good ideas.
‘You can make anything by writing.’ -C.S.Lewis
How to motivate your child to learn
Motivating your child to learn can be quite challenging, here’s a few parenting tips on how to keep your child motivated to learn inside and outside of the classroom.
This can be a challenge for some children who can lose motivation at school and find the whole exercise of school just too much. They can develop a flight or fight mentality to escape school or simply disengage, which is such a frustrating and helpless experience for the family to understand. Merely encouraging them or advising them about the advantages of school does not make a great deal of difference. In fact the more we talk about it, the more they can feel a failure in your eyes and further reject school.
Consider the following ideas to help motivate a child about school:
• Develop at home an atmosphere where learning is seen as a good thing. Talk about how you learn and what you enjoy when you want to read a book etc. Keep reading alive at home as we know that being able to read is a key to being happy and successful at school. The process of learning to read helps keep the brain active in processing information and communication. A child who reads will have less problems being motivated at school. Reading excites the imagination and keeps the interest high in learning.
• Encourage your child to be independent in their learning. Try not to put controls on them or limit what they must learn. We now know that children learn in all different ways and this creative process should be encouraged. Give them choices and affirm what they choose to learn. A motivated child will always want to follow their passions.
• Keep the conversations going and keep them frequent. Make them positive and full of reassurance and confidence in their efforts. Listen to their opinions and applaud creative thinking. A child needs to feel that how they learn has value and that what they have to say is important. They may challenge you in the way they think but that is OK!
• Notice the uniqueness of your child and home in on their interests. Sometimes their passions and interests last a short while, sometimes they last forever. Either way, your child needs to be supported in those interests and made to feel that their passions are powerful and valued. Help them to discover more about their passions. Perhaps if fishing is their interest go to the library together and collect books on fishing.
• All children learn differently. Any teacher will tell you this. Don't be critical of their learning style. Allow them to discover their best way of learning. When we force their hand at changing how they learn, this can destroy a child’s confidence and they can begin to doubt their ability to learn.
• Consider sharing games together. They are a great family activity but also reinforce that learning is a successful tool in playing games. A child works out that to be successful at the game they should try harder and understand more.
• Remember that the process of learning is what is important. Reward and acknowledge the effort, not the outcome. Remember that a child looks for your approval and is more motivated by your acceptance of their efforts rather than how they were successful. If absolute success is your goal, a child will become anxious about rising to meet that challenge. This is where disengagement can happen.
• Every child has strengths. It is easy for us to see our weaknesses and so important for a child to feel success through their strengths. Teachers are very good at picking up on this in class and will focus on a child’s strength to give them reassurance that they can easily learn. It also makes children less anxious about their weaknesses. This also teaches a child that failure is part of life and that we use it as a means to learn. Focusing on their weakness only shrouds them in a sense of failure and disengagement from school is not far away.
• Be a learner yourself and use opportunities around you to engage your child in learning. This is about developing an inquiring mind. Learning is catchy and your child will see you as someone helping them to develop an inquiring mind and to be curious about all sorts of things.
• Children can from time to time lose some motivation at school.
Remember they are children and may need time to simply rest a little from formal learning. Your teacher has an excellent knowledge on how your child learns and I would recommend you speak to them when motivation drops off.
‘There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly
-Buckskin Fuller
Laughter a great tool in dealing with stress.
How often do you laugh with your children? Do you find the things they do or talk about amusing? Can you see the lighter side of your child’s actions keeping in mind that they are the actions of a child and not an adult?
Our world can easily be seen as a serious place and children have a natural disposition to be happy and seek out happy spaces and people. They are in fact a delight to be with and a privilege to have in our lives.
In simple terms, laughter is life giving.
This article is to remind us that laughing with your child is a healthy activity to do. It also teaches your child that humour is valued and that finding humour in life situations can be very mentally therapeutic. Some people have a natural disposition to see the world in lighter ways. For others, finding the lighter side to life can be learnt overtime.
We can all see the situation in different perspectives as with the glass half full or empty. However, to find the funny side of situations is an excellent way teach your child a strategy in coping with stress.
It is no coincidence that children gravitate around people who have a positive happy disposition. They are attracted to warmth in personality and humour.
As a parent we can sometimes become absorbed in the seriousness of the occasion. After all our role is to rear our children, provide for them etc. I would add to this that a parent’s role is also to teach strategies that enable a child to cope better when times are difficult. It is also about showing them that there is humour and lightness when sometimes everything seems out of control.
Teachers are very clever at selecting moments in class that bring spontaneous laughter to the classroom. This creates a climate in the room which is inviting and generally optimistic. It says to the children that we are a happy class. Mistakes happen and we move on seeing only the brighter side of the day. It also forms a great stop gap method of taking away built up tension. Humour certainly works.
In working with children individually I would start the conversation in a positive note and try to bring in something light and happy to talk about. If we both enjoyed a joke it certainly created the environment for more comfortable talk to follow.
I know of some families that keep a joke book at home and on a regular basis they tell jokes as a family. Of course, watching funny programs or playing games is a great time for laughter in a family. However, what is better is when you the parent can spontaneously point out situations that can be seen as funny.
“Look at the dog chasing his tail. He looks like a complete circle.”
“Hey check out my hair. I look like a have had an electric shock.”
Laughing about yourself teaches the child that you are a resilient person.
It’s all about making light humour of situations, teaching the child that being positive takes away the potential of a situation turning negative. A child will certainly pick up the message and appreciate that life can be funny and perhaps not so serious.
Of course, care must be taken between misreading a serious situation and this is all about the skill of the parent in talking appropriately to the child on such an occasion.
Finally let’s look at the advantages of bringing humour into your family life.
It costs little.
It enlivens the spirit.
It gives a strong message to your child that humour is an important aspect in your life.
It lightens anxiety.
It invites a child to read a situation for what it is rather than becoming too serious.
It reminds the child that the world is not a perfect place and that perfection can be restrictive. The world can be amusing and enjoyed for this reason.
If the child is laughing at you it teaches them that you are resilient when people find you funny. This certainly talks a great deal to the child about resilience.
It also helps a child discern what is serious and what is acceptable humour. For some children this can take some time to understand.
In simple terms, laughter is life giving. It is a wonderful collective activity to do as a family and it brings in to play so many strengthening aspects of self esteem, self worth etc. Ultimately the child can begin to see the humour in themselves. How personally strengthening is that!
“A day without laughter is a day wasted.”