What’s the best way to teach your child essay writing at home? Well, there are many answers to this question since writing quality and effectiveness is a subjective judgment. While reading and mathematics are relatively rigorous and has concrete instructions to follow, writing requires individual methods. For instance, a properly completed math problem is quite obvious. But as for writing, it might be difficult to evaluate a piece – what someone considers to be a good essay, others might not.
It is still a question, whether children learn to write naturally just by practicing, or through writing strategies and instructions. However, there are effective practices and tools which are doubtless. Many educators use them and they work even when they are not applied in the classroom environment. We have listed the most helpful ones along with useful online resources to support you and your homeschooler. So let’s take a look at these practices.
Write a lot
To teach your kid to write, you have to ask him/her to write a lot. Like any other activity, essay writing requires practice. There is no such football player or swimmer who doesn’t play or swim a lot. The best piece of advice we have here is to give your child extra writing time. Let him/her write every day. The impact of extra writing is more than positive since it improves writing quality, diligence and overall productivity. Moreover, additional writing also improves kid’s mastery of a subject and helps them learn and memorize better.
It is hard to define a perfect time needed for additional writing. We believe that short writing sessions like 15 minutes a day are actually not enough because activities should also involve interpretation and analysis. The better skills development can be achieved when your child writes at least for an hour per day.
However, there is a small problem with that. Many parents ask themselves, how to make kids more motivated to spend so much time writing? Here a helping element called Internet enters a stage. To motivate your child writing more, try the website Written? Kitten. This one is funny and cute and your child will love it. It is a simple writing tool: you write the text in the field and every 100 words the website shows you… a picture of an adorable kitten. Or a puppy. Or a bunny. Yes, you can choose! If your kid gets bored when writing, Written? Kitten might keep him/her tuned.
Read sample papers
It is great to learn from someone else, especially when you need a good example to follow. Well, this also works with essay writing: you can read a number of detailed guides, but until you see the concrete example you won’t get it right. Do you know that feeling, when you are reading all those “How to...” and then you just open the complete task and slap yourself on the forehead?
Ask your child to read and evaluate papers done by other writers to let him/her understand how different types of papers are structured, formatted and developed. For instance, a student should know the practical difference between argumentative paper and research paper and there is no better way to show him/her than by the example of other works.
But beware! There are websites that offer free papers of extremely low quality, so your child won’t get anything useful from them. To avoid poor papers, try a reliable resource called StudentShare. There you will find more than 1,000,000 of academic papers to fit any subject and degree. These papers were written by top students and the quality is worthy, so your student and you can benefit from these works.
Go far beyond traditional grammar
Teaching grammar rules and drawing diagrams and schemes do not help your kid write better. We suspect that the reason is that grammar lessons are separate from paper writing and it is crucial in building a connection. So the improvement of writing can be achieved only when you model and demonstrate the correct grammar usage and show how to apply grammar rules to the sentences your student is writing.
If you are looking for an experimental study to create a strategy for your kid, try reading Concrete Grammar: Nontraditional Methods of Teaching Traditional Grammar by H. Krauthamer. There you will find creative and non-traditional teaching methods that are worth trying if you are looking for a better way to teach your child traditional grammar. Also, be sure to explain all grammar rules on examples taken from your child’s own writing. This will improve understanding.
Writing is a skill your child has to master. So when teaching your homeschooler, motivate him/her, take a careful and individual approach and don’t forget to place good examples in front of his/her eyes. Combining these methods effectively, you will achieve better results and help your child become a better writer!
