How To Encourage Your Child To Write
Ask any teenager in high school what they hate doing the most (apart from cleaning their room) and they will probably answer doing their English essay assignments. Few students enjoy writing poetry or sitting through a boring 1950s black-and-white movie that they then have to write a review on. But if your children are still young you can avoid these issues by encouraging your child to write. A great way to do this is to get your child to keep a journal about what they are doing over summer. Not only will they improve their writing skills, that will have an instant headstart on the first assignment back in the new school year and that is an essay on what they did during their summer break.
The journal itself does not have to be anything fancy. A teenage girl who enjoys keeping a journal about her life might want a pretty pink book with cotton parchment. But if you are just starting to get your six-year old to write, just a plain notebook or even some loose sheets of paper will do fine. What he or she writes on is really not that important; it is about the process of getting your child into a habit of writing every day. Keep the time set aside for writing short so they don’t get bored. Encourage them to write for just 10 minutes a day and then reward them for their effort.
If they don’t know what to write about, provide them with journal prompts. Some examples can include:
* Describe things that make me: sad, angry, happy, etc
* What would it be like if you were a: kitten, leaf, waterfall, etc.
* Write about a favorite activity or object
* Goals, what you will do in 1 year, 3 years, etc
* A log of what happened during the day and how you felt
* What you want to do tomorrow
For younger children that cannot write on their own, encourage them to draw a picture of something that happened during the day. And then when they are done have them tell you what they want to be written on their journal page. The picture they draw doesn’t have to be of what happened; the same journal prompts listed above could be used too.
A variation for this activity is to start a family journal. Have one journal for the entire family and they each have to write one page in it every night. It would be a great idea if the page each person writes is about the same topic, but it doesn’t have to be done that way.
Tags: encourage creativity, encourage writing, getting children to write, write with your child
