Tips to improve writing composition in your child

Why Is Writing Important For Your Child?

Writing is critical as it helps us to organize thoughts in a sequential order, convey messages and information and express ourselves effectively. It also sharpens our brain in observation, thinking, planning and memory recall. Your child will be assessed on this skill at his/her university level and employment. Just the way reading without comprehension is irrelevant, writing without correct use of grammar, spellings, organization and flow of thoughts is meaningless.

How Can I Make My Child Interested In Writing?

There are numerous ways to make your child interested in writing. But here I am sharing few of the important ones that would capture your little writer's interest.

1. Separate journal: Ask your child to maintain a separate diary or a notebook wherein he or she can scribble and then you do the corrections. Then he or she can make the corrections and write the corrected version in a special journal kept for the purpose
2. Writing tools: Well initially start with a simple pencil and diary gradually asking them to use different colour pencils to highlight the interesting portions in their writing. To create more interest go for a fancy looking pencil, along with an eraser and a good sharper
3. Start small: For an 8 or a 9 year old they would have started the paragraph writing in school, so take your cue from it and ask your child to write a paragraph on any one topic that he or she finds interesting. For instance there is a mother I know who has given quite simple topics to her son to write on and the son initially reluctant to write now takes pride in writing one paragraph every day
4. Take into account the interest areas: You know what interests your child so start with those topics. For instance if he or she is interested in dinosaurs let him or her write a paragraph on them. He or she would like to read more about it to write it and your child will be all the more eager to write

Activities That Can Help Your Child Nurture Writing Skills

Let's read further to find out some beneficial activities and things to remember as you plan to take on nurturing this skill for your child.

1. Reading together: Whatever you and your child are reading together, ask a variety of questions to facilitate comprehension process. You can also ask him/her to describe objects in the environment or events and incidences. Once the verbal thinking bit is covered, jotting down the same verbal content in writing will be easier
2. Daily journals: From a young age encourage your child to maintain daily journals and form a habit of diary writing. Let him/her jot down his emotions or day to day experiences in a diary. Experiences can be related to anything and everything from basketball championships/fancy dress competitions to visit to the museum or a part at home
3. Letter writing – the lost art: Help your child write letters/emails to friends or relatives, create posters or invites for events using relevant content and sharing it
4. Host an "open family mic": Once a month hosting an open family mic is another fun activity that you can consider. Invite friends and family where everyone can take turns to either recite poetry or narrate inspiring events or experiences or share stories
5. Display your child's creativity: Display your child's creative work somewhere at home where it is visible. You can post it on refrigerators, create a separate board or anywhere where you feel it will be visible. You can also train your child to take on the responsibility of decorating this board since it is his/her work that is being showcased and is an opportunity for him/her to highlight creativity
6. Writing reports: Along with these fun activities always integrate core academic work. Always write afterwards about the projects that got completed. Start with small and then move onto big. The report writing academic tasks should never be taken for granted. They are powerful training tools
7. Notes are fun on a holiday: Encourage your child to take notes when you are out on trips or holidays. Notes can be related to whatever h/she is finding exciting about the place, things around, food, culture of that place and so on
8. Interest areas on the study table: Include your child's area of interest in the writing task and help him/her collect material related to it, it could be reading material, toys or movie dvd's. When something is of our interest we naturally get motivated to write on it

Things To Remember While Nurturing Writing Skills In Your Child

1. Take care of maintaining a separate space at home with a desk or table and proper lighting
2. In terms of use of available material, initially just allow writing with paper pencil or pen. Only after some firmness and speed with these tools, move on to the use of tech gadgets like computers etc
3. While you are working on helping your child improve his/her writing composition skill, simultaneously work on strengthening vocabulary and spellings if need be
4. Let your child see you write for different purposes and identify importance of effective writing
5. Most importantly, writing like reading is a skill that will not become good on its own. You will have to devise a plan if that is a weak area for your child and it will require consistent practice to reach to a certain level

Did you like the post on tips to nurture the writing skills in your child? Do you have some more tips that you would like to share with other fellow parents? Please do share them along with your views and feedback in the comments section below.