Teach Your Kids to Enjoy Writing

High on the, "I hate..." list for most young people is writing. Math ranks a little higher for many of them, but writing is a subject few children enjoy. The time to change that attitude is while they are very young, and I have found one way that really works.

Bedtime is a struggle in many households. If you're a parent, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The kids dawdle about taking a bath, getting into their pj's, brushing their teeth, etc. Then, when you finally do get them into bed, they can think up all kinds of imaginary tasks they forgot to take care of before bedtime.

When my oldest daughter was small, I took a class at a nearby college and, after an exam, brought home the exam booklet - known in those days as a "blue book." It was a small pamphlet sized book with a number of lined pages inside for writing exam answers, and it had a blue cover on it where you put your name, the date, and the title of the class for which you were writing the exam. Every professor used them.

For some reason, this little booklet fascinated my daughter. Seeing my name on the outside and my handwriting all through the book convinced her that I was an author, even though the booklet cover was just paper like the rest of the pages, and all my writing inside was handwritten. I think it might have had 10 pages or less.

Nevertheless, my daughter, Rene, decided that she needed to write a book of her own, just like Mommy did. But she wanted her book to be orange-her favorite color at the time.

Well, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to squeeze this new development for all it was worth, so I stopped by Woolworth's (the Wal-Mart of those days) and picked up a wide-lined spiral notebook in bright orange for Rene and a purple one for her sister, Denise. The notebooks were 7x9, similar to the college blue books in size, and had about 70 pages each.

Since the day I gave the notebooks to the girls was on a Friday, I decided to make them more special by calling them the Friday Night Writing Books. We usually read bedtime stories to them each night, and I wasn't ready for a couple of 79-cent notebooks to displace a tradition my husband and I enjoyed as much as the girls did.

Anyway, the girls made a big deal about writing (printing) their names on the front of their books, and put them on the little table between their beds so they would be ready to start their writing adventure that night.

And it was an adventure. There was no argument about getting ready for bed that night. They were both in bed, propped up by pillows, and ready to write 15 minutes before their usual bedtime. I told them that since writing takes a little longer than listening to a bedtime story, they could have an extra 20 minutes before lights out on Fridays, as long as they were using it to write.

After I mentioned a few things they might like to write about-school that day, upcoming activities over the weekend, what they liked to eat or didn't like to eat, what they wanted to do on vacation, etc., they grabbed their pencils and started to write.

Did they follow any of my suggestions? No, but they were writing, and that had been my goal. They both made up a story about a girl who had magical powers. Each story was different as the main characters used their powers to do different things, but I suspect they were remembering something they had seen recently on TV.

Anyway, the pencils kept right on writing until I reminded them that it was time for lights out. They begged for more time, but I was a mean mom and told them they would have to finish their stories the next week.

Over the next year, they looked forward to Friday night bedtime. They wrote about everything you can imagine-occasionally even about some of my original suggestions, but more often they tended to stick to wild fiction. They sometimes enjoyed using different colored pencils to illustrate their writing. More than once, during the week, one or the other would say, "Hey, that's something for us to write about on Friday."

The notebooks filled with their fictitious and non-fictitious scribblings, and I headed back to Woolworth's for a new supply. Favorite colors for the covers changed from time to time, but the names of the two industrious authors on those covers remained Rene and Denise. I noticed that Rene often jotted down ideas for future writings, on the inside back cover of her writing notebooks.

They loved to read to us from their blue (orange, green, purple, red) books and often treated us to their own original bedtime stories on other nights of the week. This went on for several years before they graduated to writing in private diaries instead and were a bit reluctant to share their thoughts with us. Sigh. With their imaginations, I suspect there would have been some pretty interesting stuff in there.

Did either of them become famous authors? No. At least not yet, but they did become students who never, ever seemed daunted when assigned to write a 500 or 1000-word essay for an English assignment. And one of them even writes an occasional article for Associated Content.