Writing is one of the most important soft-skills that one can possess. For most people, the quality of their writing is determined by the effort that they have put into developing it in early life. Therefore, as a parent, it is important to help your child to cultivate the ability to write well. And this post talks about how you can go about it in a systematic manner.

Children’s Challenges with Writing

A child’s mind is inquisitive and highly receptive to information. Consequently, it is also highly unstable. So, it is difficult for a child to stay focused on one topic in their mind while thinking. And it is difficult to write well without having a reasonably mature thought process.

Again, children are just starting out with writing. So, they are bound to struggle with spellings, meanings, sentence construction, and punctuation.

So how to train children to write? We recommend a multi-pronged strategy to address each of the challenges they face.

Spellings

This is one tricky part to master. And even then, a child will never be infallible (hell, even a lot of adults aren’t). You could go about this by the standard approach of getting a child to write certain spellings multiple times. But once they have mastered a set number of spellings, you could begin to explain various rules for spellings and the relations between spellings (such as gender, singular-plural, tenses, etc.)

Meanings

Children will pick up meanings really quickly. Hence it is important that you provide them with as much reading material as possible. Allow them to stumble on newer words, and explain those to them once they ask you the meanings.

One tried and tested approach towards helping your child learn new words with meanings is to go by the etymology of such words. By helping the child to understand the meanings by the roots of the word, you also get them to learn other words that could be derived from the same root. We would highly recommend the book ‘Word Power Made Easy’ by Norman Lewis for this.

Getting children to express without fear

Do not let the fear of making mistakes scare your child into abandoning writing altogether. You could use various approaches such as using a Story Board Template to get children to write. This involves drawing a picture and writing one sentence each at the start, middle, and end of a story revolving around the picture. Allow the child to complete the story based on their imagination. Even if they make mistakes grammatically or with spellings or punctuations, do not hold it against them. Instead, explain how they could rectify the mistakes they make.