Teach Your Child Essay Writing in 4 Steps

Very often, children have difficulty writing essays. And this is quite natural because it is not easy to correctly express your thoughts on paper. Therefore, you need to start learning writing skills from school. As a rule, the programs used by teachers provide for the gradual development of such skills. However, they are not always effective. In such a situation, it is best for the parents themselves to devote a little of their time to learning at home. How to teach a child to write an essay –this is the question we want to devote our article to.

1. Where to start?

Any creative work begins with a theme. Is the topic set by the teacher or chosen by the child independently? Is it of fundamental importance? Absolutely nothing! The Writemyessays.me specialists say that your goal (as parents) is to see if the child understands the topic. So we start discussing and reasoning.

Allow your student to express his or her thoughts, ask leading questions, look for extra information in additional sources. All this will help to gather background material for future work, eliminate irrelevant to the topic, and leave only the essentials.

2. Work according to the plan

Without a plan, it will be impossible for a child to write coherently. Moreover, the more detailed the plan, the faster and easier the essay is written. Even professional journalists make plans for their articles before they write.

Tell your pupil about the three foundations on which creative work is built: the introduction, the main part, and the conclusion.

The main goal at this stage is to make it clear what each of the points in the plan should contain, and how they differ from each other.

It is up to the main participant of the process to decide when to develop the plan of action – before collecting the necessary material or after. Some children can easily cope with the choice of a topic and marking of boundaries. But they cannot decide what they will write about. For such cases, it will be reasonable to gather information first, and then write a work plan. The main condition – the plan should not appear already after writing the essay.

It is very useful to outline important thoughts for the essay. This is done so that the student does not miss anything important, always keeping in mind everything he wants to tell about. Pictures, photos, videos, and any other sources of information, including shared memories, can be used as auxiliary materials

3. Writing on a draft

No matter how much our children want to quickly cope with their homework to free up more time for entertainment and walking, they often have to put up with the preliminary completion of tasks on drafts.

Every parent should be able to convince their schoolchild that drafts are not double work, but an opportunity to correct mistakes and shortcomings in time. Do you want to help your child become a conscientious performer later on? Teach him to strive for a carefully executed result already in elementary school, and this will help him in further education.

Regardless of the form of the essay, the task of the work is to reveal the main idea. This is what the main part – the content – is devoted to. Nevertheless, as practice shows, pupils cope with the content part much easier than with the introductory part.

It is much more difficult for children to find the first phrase to start with. And there is a way out of this seemingly difficult situation.

Explain to your child that the introduction follows from the essence of the main part of his work. It indicates why such a topic is selected. To simplify the process, its writing can be postponed. Believe, the child will be much more successful with this task when the middle is ready.

Summarizing and formulating conclusions will be the final stage of the work. The main rule at this stage – do not limit the child in volume, give free rein to his thoughts.

3. Checking the results

At this stage, the participants of the process change place: you (parents) will have to work. We will be reading, crossing out, correcting, and supplementing. But do all parents do it correctly? Unfortunately, no. Often this process looks like technical proofreading of the finished material.

Are you ready to correct your child’s mistakes later, or would you like your child to master the knowledge and apply it independently? Let’s not only correct but also explain why we do it. Not to correct mistakes, but to point them out, offering suggestions for fixing.

4. How to work with materials from the Internet

If there is a task to revise a text from some source, help your child to master this method. To do this, simply show how you can express the same idea in several different ways. This is how you will help your student learn to convey other people’s thoughts in their own words. It does not matter if the child is working with some article or a ready-made essay. The essence will be the same – to read the material, understand the structure, find the most interesting thoughts, and paraphrase them.

At the beginning of his creativity associated with writing essays, the child’s progress may be small and even a little tangible. But with practice, his skill is sure to improve. And over time he will learn (if he studies diligently) to write classy texts for his age.

Summing up

Not every child wants to become a writer, poet, or journalist. However, he must be able to clearly and competently express his thoughts. And he owes it primarily to himself. It is for this purpose that essays are written at school, and for the same purpose that you do home schooling.

An important aspect of the construction of a beautiful literary speech is the child’s ability to tell about what he saw, where he was, and what he feels. Therefore, often ask the schoolchild to tell about the book he read, the movie (cartoon) he watched, the excursion or trip. In the process of conversation, unobtrusively correct his shortcomings in speaking, correct speech, ask leading questions. After a certain period of time, you are sure to notice how his speech will gradually improve. This means that writing essays will become a regular and then quite easy task for your child.