Writing is one of the most important skills that a child has to learn. It can help them to express their emotions, communicate their thoughts and, of course, is an essential part of their development, especially when it comes to their education in later years. With this in mind, here are 7 useful tips to help improve your child’s writing skills as they grow.
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Tips to Improve Writing Skills
#1. Stock Up
The first thing you’re going to want to do is to go out and get everything you need for your child to start learning proper writing skills. This means lots of paper with funky designs, lots of colourful pens and pencils and even play scissors so you can cut up their sentences into little quotes that you can stick around the house!
#2. Create a Distraction-Free Zone
While writing might come easy to us as adults, it can take children a lot more time to learn good writing skills. The process becomes so much harder if there are distractions around them to grab their attention.
Within your home, it’s important to create a distraction-free zone without phones and other electronic devices so they can really concentrate on improving their writing skills.
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#3. Choose a Word of the Week
Vocabulary is such a huge part of writing so allowing your children to learn new and exciting words. Choosing one or two words of the week is a great way to achieve this.
For example, you might like to choose words like ‘obstacles’ or ‘revolve’ since these are relatively easy concepts for them to grasp. Try to get them to include them in a short story.
#4. Educational Activities
Since writing is going to be a huge part of your child’s education, it only makes sense to include some kind of educational activity into your day to give your child a unique opportunity to write.
Jason Gaspar, a language tutor at assignment help and a Huffingtonpost expert writer suggests that for example, “you could do a science experiment, even if it’s something incredibly simple like adding baking soda to vinegar and then your child taking the time to record the results”.
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#5. Add Variety
It will be very boring for your child to simply write the same words or sentences over and over again, so you need to make sure that you’re mixing things up. You could try short stories, poetry, letters or even writing the weekly shopping list.
Mixing things up in this way is a great way to keep your child entertained and engaged with the art of writing as well as being a great way to improve their writing skills.
#6. Celebrate the Art of Writing
There are so many ways you could celebrate the art of you and your children writing in the comfort of your own home. For example, you could hold an open mic night where you and your children perform your short stories to the rest of the family.
This is a great way to engage your child with while adding a positive activity to the writing, making it far more likely that they’ll enjoy it.
#7. Practice What You Preach
You’ll already be well aware of the fact that children like to look up to their parents as role models and will emulate many the things they do, whether that’s consciously or unconsciously. However, you can use this to your advantage.
Whenever you sit down to write something yourself, whether that’s your shopping list, a diary entry or even a crossword, let your child see that you’re doing so and allow them the opportunity to ask questions and to get involved if they want to. This is a great way to teach your children to pick up the good habits of writing and will encourage them to do it themselves.
I hope these 7 tips have helped show you the many ways you can engage your child to help improve their writing skills, which will also give them a head start when it comes to their education.
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