How to teach your children essay writing in 5 steps
At first, your kids may not be thrilled with the idea of writing an essay. However, developing writing skills is important for their future – both emotionally and academically.
Essay writing is one of the cornerstones of education and more than half of the subjects your children will be tackling in their entire academic lifetime will require essay writing skills. When sitting down to teach your young ones how to write an essay, you may not know initially where and how to begin. That’s fine! At this point, you need to arm yourself with the right tips and tricks that will take your children from being a mediocre student to one that truly shines.
But if teaching essay writing seems like an impossible mission for your children, perhaps you should work on your own skills first. It takes methodical approach to make it easy for the young ones to understand what you’re trying to say. Following are some practical tips to teach your children how to write essay.
Start with the Basics
Before diving into essay writing, make sure your child has a good grasp on the basics of writing. See if they’ve got the basics of spelling, grammar, and sentence structure down. Remember to teach them the rules and concepts of writing at an age-appropriate level.
Most importantly, make sure you don’t deliver the basics into one huge lecture. Make it a fun experience! Be patient, correct your child when they make a mistake, then explain the correct way to do it.
The fundamentals of writing are the basic building blocks you’ll eventually need when it’s time to develop your young one’s essay writing skills. You will have a good idea of the fundamentals if you help your child with their homework on a regular basis, or if you’re often in-touch with their teacher. Otherwise, trying to teach your child more complex tasks like essay writing will be a big challenge for them.
Create an Outline
Once you’ve got the basics covered, the next step of the process is to explain to your child how to create an outline of the writing. With an outline, your young writer can maintain a logical progression from the beginning to the end of the paper.
Once your child learns proper sentence structuring, they may encounter difficulties with keeping the logical context within the paper because they’ll tend to focus solely on creating grammatically correct, expressive, and cohesive sentence units. Should this happen, you can teach them how to properly relate these sentence units to one another and make them adhere to the outline.
Additionally, explain to them the purpose and meaning of writing introductory and concluding paragraphs. Make sure they understand their importance and how they can properly structure paragraphs in-between, in a logical order.
Provide good examples
Providing examples of well-written, age-appropriate essays to your kids will immediately give them ideas on creating their own. David Anderson, founder of essay service review site, IHateWritingEssays, knows well that students don’t learn to write essays effectively if one’s method of teaching is based solely on explanations. As the teacher, you need to be as hands-on as possible during this stage in your child’s essay-writing development.
With improvement comes an increased confidence in one’s abilities. When this time comes, your child will be able to work and come up with an essay on their own. It’s easy to find good essay examples on the Internet so use them to your advantage and show your children what works and what doesn’t in essay writing.
Make reading a habit
Reading comes hand-in-hand with writing, so it’s no surprise that one of the best ways for a child to improve their writing skills is to simply encourage them to read – and make them love it!
Reading is a great habit because it helps increase a child’s vocabulary, which is key for developing writing skills. So the more your child reads, the more they’ll learn how to properly structure sentences and the stronger their writing skills will be.
Practice, practice, practice!
At the end of the day, no other method of teaching essay writing is better than actually writing an essay. In fact, this goes with any discipline. Because the more you practice, the more you’ll get the hang of it.
The more you practice writing with your child, the earlier they’ll learn to start thinking ahead. For instance, while they’re completing one section of their essay about one point, their mind will automatically be formulating what to write for the next section. Not only does this help them maintain a strong structure of logical thinking, it also helps save time in competitions or exams.
Conclusion
Essay writing is an important part of education, and every child needs to know how to use this skill if they are to succeed. It’s understandable if they don’t immediately love it now but as a parent or teacher, you can show them just how important it is.
With the tips provided above, you’ll be able to help your young one write the best essays possible. So go ahead, give them a leg up and help them develop a valuable skill they need to get ahead.
About the writer: Carol Duke is very keen on teaching students new, effective ways of learning. When not freelancing and blogging on education-related matters, Carol enjoys traveling, taking immense pleasure from visiting new countries.
