Writing can be an engaging activity for all children. Just as we encourage kids to run around and chase a ball before forcing them to adhere to the rules of soccer, we should make the process of learning to write fun, and worry about grammar a little later.
In the previous chapter, we discussed how creating a culture of spoken language in your home promotes reading skill development in your child. In this spirit, strive to create a culture of writing at home.
Writing can be an extracurricular activity in your home much in the way I encourage reading to be. As with reading, the more a child practices writing, the better a writer he or she will become, no matter his or her age.
The strategies in this chapter will help you approach writing with your child in a fun way. What you write is entirely up to you and your child. Your child can choose to record the day’s activities, create a series of short stories, review a video, or journal personal musings. Whenever you write collaboratively with your child, whether it is for a school assign-ment or during your extracurricular writing, you’ll need to adjust your support to match your child’s needs, which will change from year to year, week to week, and even day to day. But on average, try making writing activities something you do two or three times a week.
Encouraging a Reluctant Writer
I would like to offer a cautionary note here: When you write collaboratively with your child, whether it is for schoolwork or homegrown writing activities, don’t force your child to write beyond his or her capacities. For many strug-gling writers, their first draft is their final draft. We want writing to have a playlike quality so that your child will write more often without worrying about grammar. In time, your child will acquire the skills needed to improve punctuation and sentence structure.
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Encourage speaking. You can begin developing your child’s writing skills at any age, even well before he or she can form letters, by encourag-ing speakencourag-ing. Ask your child questions about thencourag-ings that interest him or her. Help your child elaborate on what he or she is saying by asking:
“How? Why? What happened next?” Contribute ideas and information that will help your child learn how to expand on what he or she expresses.
Finally, encourage storytelling. Your child can become a terrific story-teller long before he or she acquires the skills to write.
Encourage drawing. All children are natural artists, and luckily, drawing is another precursor to writing. Drawing promotes creative thinking, thought organization, planning, problem solving, fine motor skills, and concentration— all of which are related to writing. On a regular basis, help your young child learn to draw basic shapes such as circles, squares, and triangles. Scribbling is great too! Encourage your child to create representations for things like trees, houses, people, and animals. Go easy on formal drawing instruction and the expectation that your child’s drawing will look like yours. Nothing makes a child more self- conscious than having his or her artistic efforts compared to those of an adult.
Even as your child gets older, continue to encourage drawing; teens and young adults benefit from drawing on a regular basis too.
Create a calm space to write. To set the stage for writing together, dedi-cate an area in your home for a “writer’s workshop.” The area should be well lit and comfortable. Ask your child what seating arrangement he or she would like. Some children prefer to be in very close proximity to their parent, while others prefer to have a little distance.
Start a library. Even if your writing sessions only involve writing one sentence at a time, you will have a fairly complete piece of work within a few weeks that can be stored in a binder— the beginnings of a library.
Your child can add illustrations later, or you might consider starting with the illustrations, and then add the written component later. Either way, you will build a body of writing that your child can choose to read from when you read together.
112 Helping Your Child with Language-Based Learning Disabilities
Allow your child to dictate his or her thoughts. You want your child to focus on developing ideas without being slowed down by the process of writing. Bypass your child’s slowly emerging writing and/or keyboard-ing skills by becomkeyboard-ing a scribe: write or type your child’s thoughts as he or she says them. Go easy on correcting the grammar. You want your child to appreciate his or her own voice, not yours. You can help your child refine and clarify his or her thoughts later. We want children with dysgraphia to know they have good ideas that can be captured in writing and that they can use the process of writing to develop and organize those ideas.
Try engaging and fun activities. When children struggle with writing, they need extra support to make writing exercises engaging. There are a variety of ways you can make writing fun: Ask your child to make a drawing or cut out an interesting photograph from a magazine. Then ask him or her to dictate a story about the drawing or photograph. You can also ask your child to dictate a letter to a family member, a character in his or her favorite book, or even your pet. Another activity is to have your child dictate his or her autobiography or the biography of a family member. Create a collection of your child’s writing, and frequently read selections to him or her. This will motivate your child to write more.
Work on developing ideas. Teaching your child how to develop a nar-rative is best done by engaging him or her in a conversation. Ask your child questions that keep his or her storyline going. Along the way, encourage your child to use transition words like “first,” “then,” “next,”
and “finally.” Encourage your child to ask him or herself how, why, what if, and what then. Model your own thought process by explaining to your child how you arrived at a question or conclusion.
Go easy on the mechanics. When you are helping your child with a writing assignment, refrain from focusing heavily on correcting his or her work. But when your child seems ready, experiment with various sentence types and structures. Try writing one long run- on sentence and then help your child break it up into shorter sentences. You can also help your child explore different words to express his or her ideas by using a thesaurus. When it comes to the correct spelling of a word, be okay with
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whatever takes the least amount of effort— even if that means you provide the right spelling. Having a child look up a word will slow down the process, make it less fun, and diminish motivation.