Children have great imaginations, thoughts, and ideas due to their curious nature. Writing is a good way to channel this curiosity so that they can express their thoughts and ideas. Writing also helps with cognitive growth and organizational abilities. Writing skills were limited to copying classroom notes in the early 80s and 90s. But with the internet revolution, children have a lot of opportunities to showcase their writing skills. Creative writing is being awarded, and children get to publish their articles. This further fuels their enthusiasm and motivation towards writing. Little guidance and encouragement from teachers and parents can help the children in improving their writing skills.
In the current pandemic scenario, when all the teaching is happening virtually, it becomes difficult to encourage students to write more. But there are tried and tested ways by which online tutoring can inculcate a writing habit in children, let’s have a look:
Value of good writing
Children hesitate to write as it involves a lot of thinking and time. Tell them the importance of creative and thoughtful writing to fire their motivation. While sharing assignments, set clear expectations and the rewards that good articles would be getting. Small rewards will encourage students to put their best effort in expressing their thoughts on paper.
Active studying
Actively study the reading assignments that you are taking as part of the online English course. Don’t skip through the contents and give a holistic overview to your students. Try including articles from books or newspapers to explain the current writing trends to your students. Highlight important points while reading so that the students can take notes. This strategy will help students in organizing their thoughts. They will have a better grasp of the topic and thus will be able to write good articles.
Writing process
Explain your writing struggles with difficult topics in the class. Once they know that writing is hard work, they won’t be discouraged by their slow progress. Explicitly mention the chronological order of writing an article: ideas, drafts, reviews, feedback, revision, and publishing. Motivate them to follow the writing process so that it becomes easy for them to pen down their ideas on paper.
Writing feedback
Feedback is an important aspect of the learning process. Give constructive feedback to students while assessing their articles. Point out their mistakes and highlight the improvements that they have made in writing. Give them small rewards for the positives and don’t penalize much on the negatives. Guide them in improving their writing rather than playing the role of a critic.
Writing presentation
Give ample opportunity to students for presenting their writing in the class. They will then be able to formulate their ideas, thoughts, and focus on the topic they are writing about. Spend about five to ten minutes of class time to allow students to read their writing to each other. By doing this activity, students will also get to hear what others have written. This will introduce them to different thought processes and ideas, which will motivate them to write more.
Online resources
Online resources can help students in improving their vocabulary and grammar skills as they gradually move from kindergarten to 12th grade. Websites like guide to grammar and writing, readwritethink.com, etc. have a lot of content related to grammar and the art of writing. Share these online resources with your students and encourage them to refer to these sites to improve their writing skills.
Get published
The internet provides a lot of opportunities for writers of all levels to get published. Websites like storyjumper, littlebirdtales, etc. publish articles of students from across the world. Getting published is an amazing way of celebrating writing outside of the online classroom. Experiencing success will motivate your students to write more and more creative articles.
Encourage reading
Most of the avid readers become good writers. If the students read more, they learn new vocabulary which improves their writing. The more the students read, the better their sentence structure becomes. Once they have a good vocabulary, it will become easy for them to transition words into productive use.
For students to enhance their writing skills, they should practice as often as possible. By implementing some of these methods, you will be able to improve your student’s writing skills through online tutoring.