Teach Your Child to Love Writing

As you teach your child in your homeschool, one way you will check how much knowledge they are gaining is through having them write a paper. When a child writes an essay, story, or poem, you can check their spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, capitalization skills, and any number of things. If the child is writing a paper on a topic of their choosing, you will also learn what they are interested in.

As a mother who loves to write, I felt like it was important that my children not only learn to write, but to enjoy it. There are several ways to accomplish this.

One is to simply keep plenty of paper, note cards, spiral notebooks and other writing materials available. Keep a good supply of fun to write with utensils: plain ball point pens and pencils, of course, but also glitter pens, gel pens, colored pencils, markers and other things along this line. Try and keep all these articles in an easy to access place. Allow the child free reign to use them.

Let your child write notes to friends, family, church members and their siblings. Keep supplies of stickers to decorate their notes with. My own daughter began to write notes before she could read. I would write the words she wanted on a piece of paper and she would copy them onto her notes. By the time she was five and ready to learn to read, there wasn't a lot left for me to do. She learned to read on a second grade level in a matter of weeks.

When your child has written a paper, go easy on the criticism. It can be disheartening to see the paper you worked so hard on marked up with a red pen. You might consider making a copy to do corrections on. Let the child keep their writings together in a three ring binder. When they are older, both they and you will enjoy reading the things they thought about when they were much younger, misspellings and all.

In our own homeschool, I taught our children from a spelling book for the first three years or so, until I knew they had a good grasp of spelling. After that, although some curriculum will discourage it, I let my children write on the computer. With spell check, they could correct their work themselves before it was printed out. That was much less discouraging for them, and it really helped them learn to spell. I would read their writings afterwards, because once in a while the spell check wouldn't catch a misspelling, such as the wrong use of 'brake' for 'break'. I would point these out without marking the paper, unless I saw it misused over and over. Although I sometimes doubted my wisdom in teaching this way, recently my sixth grade daughter took a test online to find her grade level in spelling, and tested out past the eighth grade.

Let your child have blank notebooks and paper, and encourage them to write their own book. Let them cut pictures out of magazines to illustrate their stories. Read them with interest, again making corrections, but going easy on it. You don't want to discourage the child. A little correction over a period of time will do much more good in encouraging them to keep going than trying to do it all at once and taking the chance they will be downhearted and not want to keep trying. Be sure you and the child are having fun.

Giving your child a love for writing is something that will serve them throughout their lives. Don't let it be boring and dull. Go with the child's personality, and enjoy teaching them!