Teaching a child to write requires constant practice:
It is very important to train the child to write, and we do not just teach him to do it in the early stages of life, but with many technological means and smart phones, traditional writing has become a rare occurrence.
Even during study and tests, tests that use short-answer or multiple-choice questions have become the most widely used by teachers. Although these types of tests rely directly on the recall of previously memorized information, unlike expressive writing, which essay questions rely on.
But according to a study published in 2020 that analyzed many, many previous studies, it was found that writing makes education more effective and successful and enhances students’ benefit from the educational process at all educational levels without exception.
For example, expressive writing requires the child or student to go back to what he has previously studied and create a new meaning of his own from what he has studied to answer the question, and not just to bring the answer from his memory. This is not limited to a specific subject, as it includes languages , science , and even mathematics .
Practicing writing enhances a child's learning skills.
The reason the study discovered for the child's habitual use of writing is that writing improves the students' ability to remember information and make new connections between the concepts they have studied, so that in the end the child creates for us a prose piece that is closer to a novel than to the fabric of his thoughts.
But for many children, writing is not easy. Many children find it difficult to put their own thoughts down on paper.
But it is precisely this difficulty that makes writing so valuable for the expressive skills it provides our children. In order to learn better, we need to help children use their writing skills.
Before starting the exercises
Before we start talking about activities that will help train a child to write, we must first prepare our children for this. Here are several basic steps that we can use to train our children to practice writing:
- Benefit from smartphones
As mentioned earlier, a child may have trouble expressing his thoughts on paper and will often find it difficult until he becomes comfortable using pen and paper. Therefore, we can use smartphones or any device that the child is familiar with to start writing until he finds it easy.
- Provide the tools he needs
We also need to provide our children with writing tools at home and make them available to them so that we can encourage them to use them, including suitable colors and papers that may motivate them.
- Child writing participation
A very important part of what we are talking about is to write in front of the child and share with him how to do it, especially if he is at the beginning of his school life. We can draw some expressive shapes or write some phrases, and we can share with him the activities that we will mention later.
5 activities to train your child to write
Below we will mention 5 activities that include writing, which will help the child gain the greatest benefit from learning, whether with the help of his parents or teachers, and whether in the early or advanced school years. These activities will greatly help in achieving the goal of using writing more by your child.
- I wonder
For the teacher, after explaining the lesson you can ask the children or students to write down a question I wonder about what was explained. Questioning usually encourages students to think outside the box and go further in exploring their ideas.
- Learning notebook
Children can be encouraged to keep a small notebook in which they can record their daily study results and track their progress and learning.
We can encourage them to write down everything they feel is related to the outcome of what they have studied, whether it is written or drawn as diagrams.
Having the child follow up on what he has learned and write down gives him the ability to summarize and evaluate his ideas, and the best thing is definitely to review his academic progress. This step requires help and participation from the parents to achieve the greatest benefit from it.
- Less risk more expression
As a teacher, you can motivate students to write by exposing them to less risk. How? By choosing questions that are easier for the child to ask, which will boost their confidence and ideas, and make them more comfortable and willing to express themselves. This is a very effective and popular method for promoting constructive critical thinking in the child, and it makes them more prepared for higher-stakes questions and even difficult tests.
This is done through a few simple questions like what do you think about that, can you explain that, what differences and similarities do you see? All of these prompts help the child think about the subject matter in a positive and less risky way and always provide an appropriate introduction to the lesson. You can learn more about this method of promoting constructive critical thinking in your students here.
- Student magazines
In this advanced step of the writing exercise, we help the child write short essays on topics they have previously learned. When the student explains the information they have learned to many real readers through the essays, they can then make connections between what they have learned and how it has made an impact, and it helps them fill in the gaps in their knowledge of what they have learned.
- Creative writing
Since we have reached the last activity, it is not easy.
However, after going through the previous activities, our child will be somewhat prepared for this step. Creative writing allows us to transform our children’s imagination into something written and tangible. Imagine a short story with many children’s dreams.
Therefore, we can use it to help the child write a story that combines all the concepts of, say, the previous science lesson with a story inspired by his imagination with his own narration, and we wait for the result.
Several areas of the brain are activated with this previous process, which makes the child interact personally with all the information and materials he receives.
Expressing ideas is the most important thing about ideas.
If we follow the previous steps, whether by preparing our children well or by involving them in the activities we talked about, we will be able to enhance their self-confidence and expressive ability.
We must take care to implement the activities we mentioned in order and monitor our children well and the extent of their interaction with these activities, whether for parents or teachers.
Training the child to write by creating a suitable environment for the child that helps him to do so is the most important thing. Also, participating in what he does increases his confidence in what he does.
And we should always allow him to express his opinion verbally at first if he cannot do so in writing at first, as the purpose of this is to enhance his ability to express himself.
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