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As your child grows
up, it becomes more and more urgent to acquire some
fundamental skills to propel and maintain further
growth and development of your child.
Learning to write
is one key piece of knowledge that can make a significant
difference to your child's life.
As a parent, you must
make sure that your child learns to write early enough
and the skill of writing manifests in the desired
way. The child must be able to write properly, with
correct spelling and grammar, and be able to apply
language skills to come up with writings that are
pleasant to read.
Teaching writing to
your child is one of the biggest challenges that you
shall face while educating your child. If your child
is doing homeschooling then the onus is completely
on you with no teacher ready and available for help.
And of course, once
you start teaching writing to the kid, the kid would
realize that writing does not happen on its own -
it takes some effort. What is the reaction? "Mom,
I despise writing."
At this
stage, you would start to try all the possible ways
that you can think of to make your child start liking
to write. At the same time, you also try to be corrective.
You try to rectify spelling errors. You try to point
out the grammatical issues and make the kid understand
them. You do everything possible. In fact, you often
end up doing more than what you should do trying to
help the child's process of learning, and end up hampering
the process in a big way.
Let us
take a step back and think through. What is it that
motivates you? In other words, what is it that motivates
everyone? There are two fundamental elements - curiosity
and self-interest. Only if a person is curious can
s/he unearth the bowels of a process. Only if a person
has self-interest would start trying to perform things
on their own. If any of these go missing, there is
no point in pursuing an activity further. I am sure
you are getting by now what I am trying to say here
- motivate your child not by asking to write and write
better; rather, get your child curious and interested
about writing.
Try
to analyze your young toddler or child from this angle.
Does s/he
not want to do things by own efforts? Does s/he not
try to dress like adults, play going to office, cook
mock food and act independent? As adults we are usually
amused by their efforts, but to the child it is an
outcome of an absolutely serious effort. And in fact,
parents with the right education do try and respect
the outcomes of these attempts to the extent possible,
even though these outcomes are most often rather disorganized.
The
essence of the matter is that - do not step over your
line and attempt to help the child. If you keep
doing so, then the child will never get to learn completely.
Rather, s/he will remain always under your guidance,
and your mature shadow will keep eclipsing his/her
best efforts. The outcome will contain much more of
you rather than your child. This is exactly what you
would need to avoid if you want your child blossom
into an independent achiever.
The same
applies to writing also. Think of it now - you yourself
thought that you indeed make your best attempt to
rectify all the issues that you could see in your
child's writing. You did try to make every possible
correction. How, then, can you let the child blossom
in writing? And, is not the goal to improve the child's
standard of writing to the possible best?
Yes, absolutely
so. That is exactly the goal and you are completely
missing it by stepping beyond your lines. You are
raising the bar for the child unrealistically - the
standard is becoming too high for the child to achieve
even in spite of his/her best efforts. Of course it
is extremely likely that your child's best will be
much below your average, but let the child achieve
his/her best rather than your average. It is a child's
writing that you want to produce here, not an adult's
writing. It can never be so shiny and perfect - it
is bound to have its own imperfections. The spelling
and grammar issues are bound to happen - coming from
a child who is nowhere close to mastering the language,
these are the obvious issues. It simply can not be
flawless. If it was so perfect, then the writing was
probably not done by the child. It would be far better
if one would stop announcing indirectly the level
of immaturity of one's child by correcting and altering
everything the child writes - don't be embarrassed
of what your child is capable of producing; rather,
love it.
How, then,
to best teach the child to write? It is nothing difficult
- apply your mind to achieve this. Here are some points
that you would want to do.
- Make the child
curious about how to write well. Show them pieces
that have been written and are directly connected
to their lives. Letters can be one example and diaries
and journals can be another. Emails and blogs can
be good examples too.
- Inspire the child
- s/he may initially think writing is a huge challenge
but you need to convince him/her that it is not
so.
- Reward the child
if s/he produces good quality writing. For example,
you can get them to write a 300-word article on
their favorite subject, and you can even arrange
for a competition among children with a first prize,
a second prize and some consolation prizes. Show
them that writing as a group activity is also exciting.
- Write letters to
your child. Encourage them to exchange letters with
their friends.
- Give your child
a notebook and pen that s/he can carry in pockets.
Raise the thought in their minds to quickly make
a note of anything that they find interesting. Better
still, show them how they can write stories out
of such notes and get published. Achievements such
as seeing their own names published with their stories
can lift their morals to supreme heights.
Thus,
teaching children the skill of writing and god writing
can be made a much easier task than it sounds simply
by understanding the objectives of children's writings
and making them write out of their own interest.
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